MadCap Software Forums

A couple of times now, I've gotten requests from reviewers to be able to edit a document collaboratively. That doesn't seem to be the model for Contributor. Both times, I generated Word output, did a copy and paste into Goggle docs and went that way. But that isn't great - there's formatting loss ...

There are too many ways to import and too many places to do it. What I was looking at was importing an existing Flare project into another (also existing) project.

I get there via:
Project > Import > Flare Project.
I get a dialog that says: Select Project to Import.
I usually uncheck "Auto-reimport ...

If you are stuck doing this manually, you don't have to change every style in every topic by hand. If Analyzer says you have 59 instances of <p class="Elephant style="color:pink"> and you want to map this to <p class="PinkElephant">, you can use Find and Replace, click Find in source code, and ...

This is a gotcha in the UI.
When you have filled in the first screen of the Import Flare Project Wizard, make sure to click Next, not Finish.
On the second screen, the first line says "Include Files". Click the down arrow and select All Files. If you don't do this, It defaults to *.htm.

I really ...

If it's really doing <ol><h1>stuff</h1></ol>, you don't even need a regular expression editor. First, back up and follow all warnings & caveats from Dorcutt.
Then do a Find and Replace in Files, click Find in source code, and do a replace all
<ol><h1> to <h1>
</h1></ol> to </h1>

No regular ...

I wonder if you're missing a font. That would explain the weird spacing. The font may not have been set up on your machine.

I would definitely recommend using another svn tool to look at what is going on with your files. If you are comfortable using svn on the command line and you have that set up, you should be able to navigate to your project (inside the folder where the .flprj file is) and type

svn status -u

if you ...

I would worry about replacing spaces with non-breaking spaces and hyphens with non-breaking hyphens. Our users sometimes copy code from our documents and special characters such as non-breaking spaces can break the xml.

It works for me, although of course I don't have the images. But I get the border.

Have you used the svn command line to check what is going on? I have gotten myself into a conflicted svn state before and have had to do serious svn command line magic to fix it outside Flare. Adds and deletes are particular culprits, and a rename is just a combination of those two. Flare often does ...

I implemented this with conditional text and snippets. So I have a product that has Pro and Community versions, and filenames, etc., vary with the product:

filename-versionnumber (for pro version)
filename-cp-versionnumber (for community version)

To handle this I have a snippet with conditions on ...

In Flare, the skin is selected in the Target file, which controls the output. Similarly, you can select different stylesheets for different targets. So you can definitely have different skins. If you look at the Flare samples page, there's a company there that has Web, Mobile, and Print output - the ...

I have a bug. There is a file, TopicA, that a coworker has modified, and that I have not touched. Flare is claiming that I have modified the file, even after I deleted the file from the file system and pulled down the latest file from svn through Flare. What?

In my experience, you will get Configuration1, Configuration2, etc. You can then rename as appropriate.

Flare has a lot of moving parts, and so it is natural to be confused when you start out. I actually printed out several of the Flare manuals and put them in binders when I first started out, because that was the only way I personally could get my head around the product.

To make output you need ...

This is not normal or obvious behavior. The only thing I could guess is if the ConditionTagSets folder somehow got corrupted or renamed. If the conditions file is in some other location it doesn't seem to work.

If you have tech support, I would definitely contact them.

We recently changed our svn integration, and the delete functionality is working much better. In our previous functionality, it didn't matter how many times we did a commit inside Flare -- deleted files weren't being committed. We had to go outside and use a different tool to commit deletes.

Now ...

I don't think you can do it with Flare's conditional text -- as far as I know, the tags for conditional text don't appear in the final output. One idea - you could try to define a number of different divs and then have development set up their server so that the divs are displayed based on role. (I ...

hmm. It seems to be in the output folder, with the extension .mclog. However, it does not have a version number & is not so easy to go to that folder and change things. Even if you change the name, the file is overwritten in the next build, if you can get it to build after touching the folder. (It ...

When you paste your text in, it will show a little clipboard. Click on it and select "Paste Inline Text". Then format it as pre.

(To conserve room on a line, I usually go to an external editor before pasting and replace tabs with 2 spaces. If you want to add any line breaks for ease of reading, it ...

Thanks! You know, I went in that dialog box (I am experimenting with putting a dictionary on a network drive) and didn't see that setting. (Presumably because I already had a solution.) It does indeed work. The downside is that this has to be set by each user on each machine, instead of setting it ...

In Flare 10, I set the following on our code styles:

mc-language: none;

This meant they were skipped by spell checking, which was nice. There was one paragraph style (pre) and one font style that I used this on.

I'm now looking at the global dictionary feature and running a spell check, and the ...

Since these chapters are conditioned, perhaps from Flare's point of view, they don't exist and hence aren't accessible.

If the xrefs are really in the topics that are going into the target, I would track them down and somehow make them conditional as well, so that when you are building with this ...

You could also create a page layout with the watermark image and save it with a new name (like DraftLayout or DraftPortrait). Then you could set that as the default layout in your target for the draft output, and just switch back to the regular layout for the final version. For a large team, this ...

Thanks. We're mostly a Unix shop, but I'll ask around!