MadCap Software Forums

Our Flare (version 6) web help compile went from 10 minutes to 50 minutes recently. I've just diagnosed the cause, and talked to Support to get help with the solution. I thought I'd share because I know other folks use Captivate output in their help.

For each movie, we generate a SWF file and an ...

I found a couple of ways to do it; (a) generate a PDF target that contains an index with no page numbers, then copy and paste that list, (b) edit the Used Index Keywords report to hide the stuff you don't want.
Brilliant!
The Used Index Keywords report worked fine to produce a list like this ...

I would like to get a text list of the index entries used in my projects. Can anyone think of a way to extract that from Flare?

I've tried looking at the Index_Chunk#.xml files in my webhelp output, and they are in there, along with the other data needed to make the index link.
<IndexEntry ...

tworks wrote:I can access the Related Links, I am unable to get my links to popup windows to work in IE8.

Can you provide some more detail about what isn't working? Also, which version of Flare are you using?

Bob

You could always do a Find and Replace across the project. If you search in the source code, you can replace that snippet code with the desired text.

Put <MadCap:snippetText src="Resources/Snippets/SnippetName.flsnp" /> in the Find What field and Replacement Text in the Replace with field. Pick ...

My tables always start new pages if they can't fit entirely on the starting page. (Similar to to the way Keep With Next and Keep Lines Together would work in Word.) This seems to be default behavior for tables.
I don't think this is the default for PDF output--I think you may have something set in ...

...and i already created a printversion of the manual...does that mean that i can´t switch to the earlier version??
I'm not sure what you mean by this part.

The other possibility for retrieving the file is if another user has worked on it, either on their computer or on your computer. Look in ...

We specify a master stylesheet for each target (web and print), but from the beginning of time, our topics have included a reference to the stylesheet in the meta data: <link href="Resources/Stylesheets/WebHelp.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Twice in the past few years we've had reason to ...

Welcome to the forums!

I don't think there is any way within Flare to quickly display all of the available styles. As you noted, the Style drop down shows styles available in your current context . Since Flare uses XML, it only shows you styles that you can apply at the current cursor position ...

From what I recall, Flare takes the images in your topics and compresses when making the PDF. In the past, they were trying to balance the quality of the images with the output size. It sounds like Acrobat was able to further compress what Flare was generating to get a smaller file. Now that you're ...

Forgot to mention that I tried resetting the layout, and it didn't work.

I have since restarted Flare and now everything is behaving. Strange. I guess if it keeps happening I'll report it as a bug.

Bob

Today my Flare UI is acting strangely. When I launched Flare, the background color of the toolbars is gray instead of blue. It doesn't seem to have any affect on functionality, but it is odd. You can see glimpses of the default blue around the edges and in the accordion buttons.

Is anyone else ...

Unfortunately, Flare does not expose those formatting elements through the Skin Editor. (You may want to request that MadCap fix that using the Enhancement Request form .

There is an article in the MadCap Knowledgebase that covers how to fix those issues in the Javascript files:
http://kb ...

I understand the learning curve, er "cliff," you're facing. Some parts of Flare seemed utterly foreign to me when I started with it. It took me a while to grasp how to use Find and Replace--the functionality is there but the interface wasn't intuitive.

Part of the difference when you're coming ...

I don't think Flare has a way to type in smart quotes or curly quotes like Word does. I found this thread where the issue was discussed in 2009.

It is possible to do a search and replace in Flare, but that seems very tedious. You'd have to search for the basic quote character in the source to ...

For some reason or another, the change to mc-header-level that I thought I'd applied to H3 and H4 didn't seem to take, so I applied them again and it worked.

Glad you got it solved. I noodled over your problem yesterday and couldn't think of what else might be wrong. I hate that Flare is driving ...

Hi, what is the latest and greatest help format for windows? I'm familiar with chm, but I heard that there may be a newer version that is the new standard.
As SteveS says, web help is really the primary help format these days, though lots of people still make CHMs. You may have heard about Help ...

I tried searching for "link to PDF" and it complained that the words were too common!
The search function on the forum is frustrating in this regard. It's a problem with the bulletin board software that MadCap uses.

You can get full-text searches of the forum by going to Google and entering "site ...

I think there is a corollary to the "business cares about how much money they make on the money they spend" argument from RamonS (with which I heartily agree). Your boss will care (or should care) more about your customer's satisfaction than your professional satisfaction. Any argument you make for ...

I have never tried to control the column widths using the stylesheet. I typically set the properties for one sample table and make a snippet of it. Then I insert that snippet when I need a new table, convert it to text, and make changes to the content.

I tried assigning widths to the columns in ...

I think you can do this by adding the span.SearchHighlightXX styles to your stylesheet and setting background-color to (default).

Use the instructions in the Flare help topic ("Using Styles to Change the Look of Highlighted Search Terms") to add the span.SearchHighlight1 through span ...

Have you tried compiling to see if it behaves differently? I find that the preview does not mimic real conditions in some cases.

Bob

I don't think there is any way to print the TOC itself. I don't remember exactly what the RoboHelp output looks like. Could you get by with screen shots?

lissaSB, at this point I'm about stumped. If you want, you can contact me offline via private message and maybe I can look at your files.

Looking back at your original message, I thought of one more way to troubleshoot. You said that everything works in the original Flare project. You could make a ...

Wow, this is a sticky problem!

- putting the movie files into the same directory as the topic calling them (the structure used in the old project)

I think you must replicate the directory structure where the movie worked. If the files were all in the same folder before, they must be that way in ...