MadCap Software Forums

Projects started in RoboHelp, aeons ago, converted to Flare at version 1, and grown-and-modified to make WebHelp for the past half-dozen years (ok, recently, it's what MC calls "HTML5"). No PDF. A few customers lamented, but HTML content was fine for the majority.

Lately, we have lots more ...

Outside the forums, somebody suggested the Flare Synonyms feature.


Looking into it for my purposes.

In my Help ToC, I had a "Concepts" section.
Bosses/reviewers want it to go away. Its content is to be brought into other sections, mostly Admin & Maintenance which is ... big.

Now, those same bosses and reviewers want certain pages to be much easier to find. At the moment, they are two or three ...

Yes, thanks, I realized that. I wanted the default to remain at "See...." for the hundreds of Xrefs where that made sense. I thought I could just override that text within the GUI editor for the few dozen where I wanted specific different text. That is, I wasn't going to bother creating another ...

I'm still using FLare 8 on Windows 7.

For Cross References, I have default text in Xref format - See "{paratext]" - because that's a handy default in many situations.

However, I sometimes have to modify it to fit a sentence.

Or I thought I did. I thought I could override the default, while ...

That would have to be one honkin'-big tablet!

I'm staring at a dual-head setup with 24-inch and 27-inch displays, as I type this. Flare is on the right-hand screen, while Outlook and various source documents, and a draw program and some utilities and three or four SSH terminals are on the left ...

Three existing projects, on two different servers, will be coming together within a year or so, as the products are aligned.

I need to have them share a common Resources folder, with images, snippets, etc.

In the Properties dialog for the Resources folder, the "Location:" field is grey and won't ...

OK...

HOW do I actually accomplish that?

The Properties dialog that opens from the right-click menu for Resources shows me the filepath to Resources in the current project, BUT, it is grayed-out and I can't change it.

So, I've got three different EXISTING projects, each with more than a ...

What's the best way to get multiple related topics from one Flare project to another?

I updated a project, which included revisions to about 20 topics related to "feature-x", bringing those topics into a new feature-x sub-folder in Content Explorer, and gathering the somewhat-scattered ToC links ...

Ooooo! Excellent.

I hadn't thought of doing it that way.
Is that a recommended approach in one of the Flare docs I haven't read?
Or is it just what the smart people have figured out? :-)

Either way, very smart, and I'm going to start doing it that way immediately. Thanks.
I hadn't clued-in to ...

Craig,
There can be a "gotcha" with that unless the project is local to your machine.
VPN is a hit and miss for a lot of people.

Personally, I VPN into the office network and then use Remote Desktop into my workstation and that keeps all the power and projects on the same machine. It avoids ...

In the Content Explorer, I leave all my topics listed alphabetically under the Content folder (and there are MANY). I condition for Print and Web either inside the topic or in the TOC, but I also use some visual conditions in the Content Explorer. I'll apply an 'In Progress' condition (in Content ...

It wasn't working for me, until I split some merged cells in the Word table. Then it came over to Flare just fine.

I just needed the nudge to keep trying.

Thanks.

I have a source document in MS Word 2010... ish.

It includes a table - 3 columns by 100 rows.

What is the most efficient way to get this into Flare 8 without doing about 300 individual copy-paste operations?

I have some projects (well over 1000 topics each, hundreds of graphics each) that became WebHelp in RoboHelp, seven or eight years ago, then became Flare projects with Flare 1.1, and have grown and mutated over the years. They were intended to be WebHelp, and so they used many, many expanding text ...

Maybe it's my environment.

My source files all live on a Windows Server 2008 R2 Virtual Machine instance, somewhere.
When I'm (rarely) working direct from my laptop, it's a Windows 7 Pro 64-bit machine, running the Flare 8 app locally against the remotely located project files.
When I'm (most ...

I can't reproduce this myself; anything I paste (using any method) will cause the topic to change, and the file name to be marked with an asterisk (*).

Might be worth contacting support.

Yes, of _course_ it will be marked with an asterisk.

And then you do Save all.
And the asterisk goes away ...

If you update the content of a Snippet, and you SAVE it, are files that have that snippet [link] inserted supposed to update, too?
Assume that when I say "Save", I mean "Save all".
That's the only way I do it.

I just changed a Snippet, S A V E D A L L, then Built and Published, only to find that ...

I have many hundreds of topics per project, but I've heard from plenty of other writers who have THOUSANDS... so I wonder what they do...

I have Flare 8 installed in a virtual machine running Windows Server 2008 R2. The VM has 40 GB of disk space and at least 4GB of system memory for its exclusive ...

Possibly (probably?) everybody else knows about this, and I'm the only dummy. But in case I'm not, here's a little something that I discovered today:

Make a change to a Flare topic (or Snippet), by typing text, deleting anything, or inserting a graphic, then go through the sequence "File > Save all ...

That gives TocEntry a single new icon for ToC Entries.
Been there.
Done that.
All my ToC books are preceded by plus and minus icons in the color scheme of my skin.
All my topics are preceded by that ubiquitous page-of-text icon... in an appropriate color, of course.

I was just wondering if a ...

In the Properties window for ToC entries, the Advanced tab includes "HTML Help Icon:", which has a canned dropdown list of little icons that can be used to decorate/preceed each ToC entry INDIVIDUALLY. Apparently that appears only in the Flare ToC editor and in HTML Help output.

In WebHelp or ...

Thanks. That worked.

But.... the old one worked for years 'n' years. Wrong or not.

But, it DID require the content folder to be included in the path.

All,

Back in the days before Flare talked HTML5, I created Flare WebHelp.
The employer supplied an EXTERNAL front page (START_HERE.html) from which the customer could launch the Help or could open some local non-help documents, or could link to certain external resources.

I had three requirements ...

In breadcrumbs, you have the proxy with its boilerplate text - default "You are here:", and then you have a series of links that could be any of MCBreadcrumbsLink variants (Active, focus, hover, link, and visited). Then, the string ends with the name of the current page/topic, which is not a link ...