MadCap Software Forums

I thought the following exchange with MadCap support might help people understand how orphans/widows work. It wasn't quite how I expected...

Widow / orphan controls govern content within a single tag (e.g. a <p> tag with three lines of text in it would be prohibited from leaving one or two lines ...

Plus it's a little presumptuous of Madcap to assume that everyone who uses Flare is also using Exchange (we don't, and we're not about to start using Exchange any time soon...). If your network doesn't use Exchange, there's no way to turn the feature off so it stops bugging you.

No quick way to do that, I don't think. That would be a great utility, though -- make sure you submit a feature request, something along the lines of "update TOC titles to match first heading" or something like that.

In case you're not familiar with it, you can submit bugs and feature requests ...

Flare itself doesn't have the capability of adding/editing callouts to images.

The MadCap folks have put callout functionality in MadCap Capture. You can open the image in Capture (or even take the screencapture with Capture, if you're talking about a screen image) and add all the callouts you ...

If this is for Word output, unfortunately I think you're barking up the wrong tree; when you export to Word from Flare, Divs get ignored completely. This means that any page break settings you applied to the Div would be lost when you go to Word.

It might work if you're going directly to PDF (I ...

From what I understand, Suze is correct: case is only an issue for Linux/Unix. For Windows it doesn't matter.

True - just remember that what matters here is which OS the system that is hosting the help is running. For example, if you host your help on a web server, it doesn't matter if the ...

Hi there
I'm not an expert. I don't think there's much of a problem with most output types. However Linux filenames are case sensitive, so you need to be careful you don't change the case after you've set up links.
I'm sure someone can give you more accurate information, but I think Linux is the ...

I agree with Skellington, snippets would be the best approach to dealing with this. Make a snippet that contains the text from the glossary entries you have, then insert the appropriate snippet in place of the glossary hot spot. If you later need to update the content of a value definition, you open ...

Just for comparison purposes, I would install Flare on a "real" system rather than a virtual one and try the same operation. If it works on a real system but is bad in VM, it could be either there's something about the specific VM environment you're using that Flare doesn't like or that Flare doesn ...

The .Net frameworks are provided by Microsoft to allow programs developed using .Net (including Flare) to operate. They are a pre-requisite for Madcap products.

And they are plural because you have have multiple versions installed at the same time (i.e. you can have 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 all ...

Check the Target as well to see if it has a stylesheet specified.

doc_guy wrote:However, Flare is built on the .NET framework, and the .NET framework doesn't support OpenType fonts that weren't created by Micro$oft. So, it would appear that currently MadCap has their hands tied due to the limitations of the framework.

So we should send the hate mail to Steve Ballmer?

The PROPS are probably the culprit. Like Andrew, I don't have any PROPS files here that are much above 600 KB. 47 MB would suggest either that you've captured an area the size of a billboard :shock: or that there is an enormous amount of callouts and other added elements in there. Or they could have ...

Of course, if you're having to go to paper anyway, the other option is to output the whole thing, then just print the pages you need and distribute them (i.e. print pages 123 - 128).

Thank you all for your input. I moved the TOC head to an h3, which is set to zero (we only go two levels for our TOC), and it still did not work. Flare's help specifically says to use a zero value in the MCHeading print support, but alas...no go.

Make sure that you're applying the mcheading level ...

400 MB of RAM is *tiny* for Flare (it's also a very odd number -- are you using a virtual machine, like Virtual PC 2007 or VMware?).

Heck, for that matter 400MB is small for XP. And yes, it is a very odd number for RAM (RAM typically ships in increments of 256 MB, 512 MB, or 1024 MB aka 1 GB ...

Hm, want to show us the code for that section?

If it really is calling two distinct variables, that could be a bug.

Also, I'm not sure what the accepted guidelines are for this sort of thing, but I've seen a few help systems that do this and they give the user the option to switch it off/on.

In any case, I'd definitely speak to your developers for help on the coding.

And in addition to that, you would ...

If you have set a stylesheet for the Target, you can't change the stylesheet for individual topics. So I think what you should do is open the Target file.

Flare won't autodetect where the variable is in a sentence. Are you manually putting a different variable in for the capitalized one, or are you using the same variable with two possible outputs? The first method will work (I use it for singular / plural forms) but second unfortunately will not.

I think you'll find that that's the way browsers behave - when you expand a dropdown or other expandable content, they change the size of the page but do not change your location in the page. Point being, yes, it would be nice if it behaved differently, but I don't think it's Madcap's bug. You'd ...

For your own sanity, I would change the names of the images - for example, instead of calling it Add.png everywhere I would change it to Add_Mod1.png, Add_Mod2.png or something like that. That way if someone copies / moves files to the wrong place by mistake, you don't end up over-writing one ...

... and I'd start questioning the qualifications of your "Flare guru" - this is pretty basic functionality and has been there since at least version 2.0 (that's when I started using Flare and it was there when I started - I ran into the same trouble you did when I was evaluating the software and a ...

Is there a way to have Flare always save a topic when I close it? Sounds like a simple request, but I can't find this anywhere.

I know that if you enable Auto Save and the topic has been automatically saved, you will not be prompted again to save when you close. But I am making a large number of ...

Last I looked, XP 64 isn't that well supported for drivers, apps, etc. Vista 64 has better support (largely because it has a larger install base).

For 32 bit systems, XP is still the choice I would make, but for 64 I would take Vista. (And spend half an hour or so turning off all the "you clicked ...