MadCap Software Forums

I moved it to a better place.

Is the slowness in every topic? I noticed the decrease in performance with long topics that have a lot of tables. Do you have many topics open at the same time? Does it get better when you pause AV for a while?

Not much to go by....is there enough drive space? Does your account have permissions to write to the output folder? Does it work when you pause antivirus? Is there anything in the Windows application or system logs?

I had concerns when they announced switching to agile. Every time I've worked in agile environments, it has meant more rushing to get things done and less time spent on testing and quality assurance. Considering Flare isn't exactly the most stable of products to start with, I hope this is just a ...

Hi Shawn,

Sounds like a bug to me. I recommend contacting support, if you haven't already.

I have and the response back was an extremely disappointing and lazy form message to zip my Flare project and send it to MadCap support... nothing more. Another less than optimal support answer. MadCap ...

As far as I know (but I do not know everything) it is a "No" for both. The first item seems more to be like a wiki, a standard set of articles is provided, then the customer can do whatever they want with it. There is currently no direct way for Flare to publish to Wikis, but there are tools that ...

Only took Microsoft 20 years to catch up to Linux.

The entire path length is determined by the topic file name, the path to it, AND the command used. Looking exclusively at path/file only tells half the story. As far as path goes, there are several words spelled out entirely that can be shortened without losing informational value.

As far as Win 10 ...

The only advice I have is to shorten folder names and flatten the folder structure...or move to the latest build of Win 10 that supposedly removed the DOS era restriction on the path name length.

I don't think so...after all, Flare is the tool to make changes to files.

One idea might be to commit all files to source control, then check them out not using Flare, then use a different editor to make the changes you need, then commit everything again. Next time around Flare would not know the ...

May want to give ArsClip a try (http://www.joejoesoft.com/vcms/97/), it is a clipboard manager that helped me out many times. It can keep HTML in its clipboard allowing it to be pasted.

Just a few guesses:
When this happens again disable antivirus at least for 10 minutes or so. Could be that AV comes across the Flare project files and the short but necessary file lock might send things into a tailspin. Other than that, are any scheduled tasks running at those times? That would mean ...

I use the canned Flare PDF target and generate the PDF. That gets then sent to anyone who asks for it. The customer can then use any PDF reader to print as much or as little as they want. It may vary per user base and industry, but for us we have ~3000 customers who could ask for it and I think ...

Yes, header files are mainly used for developers. Ask the developer what they need and go from there. The developer might even prefer to provide you with a header file that contains aliases / IDs. You can import that into Flare and the wire things up to the topics.

Will I need a header file, alias file, and topic IDs?
No, but you should not dismiss aliases / IDs entirely. But first the "No" part:
You can reference topics by path and file name. You call the start topic as you always have to for CSH and pass as parameter the path within the project and the ...

That is a question for the web server admin. I do know that a server can be instructed to show custom content when encountering an error such as a 404. If each help system cannot get its own static 404 page then look into writing javascript. The server knows what was requested and from that ...

Not sure on the 404 other than modifying it for those sites to provide a link to the main help. You could add in a redirect, but rather sooner than later you want to let people be aware that they bookmarked old stuff.

Google indexing as any other indexer comes by the sites at random. Eventually ...

I don't think this will work because the PDF viewer will need to include a video decoder/player. I have read that .flv files can work in PDFs, but I haven't tried it myself.
What you can do is add the first frame as an image and turn that into a link that opens up a browser playing the video from a ...

I tried it with my small project and build/publish changed from 2 minutes to over 3 minutes with that option on. I definitely saw that those topics that contain a lot of text take significantly longer to get processed. Not that much of a surprise, there is more stuff that needs to be done.

I don't have that search option enabled. I can try it out later assuming if I do not forget about it.

Takes about 15 minutes for my main project and about 2 minutes for my other project, but build times will vary drastically based on size and complexity of the project.
I wouldn't build on a VM unless you happen to have a really high performing host server with fast storage. VMs tend to have quite ...

My recommendation is to use HTML5 served up from a web server, but that option is one you excluded already.

You can use HTML5 help without delivering it through a web server, but users may run into some restrictions for active page content (JavaScript) for local files. It will also be necessary to deploy the entire set of files to every client install. Overall, HTML5 help is typically not large unless you ...

For 2016R2 the new 2017 is an upgrade. For v12 it is not. I know, it is confusing.

Updates never show the new version, only updates to the installed version....at least that is how I recall it. I may be wrong.