MadCap Software Forums

I sat in on the Flare 8 webinar a few weeks ago and Mike Hamilton explained that the reason they went with the ribbon was to address the "perception" that Flare was "hard to learn". He also went on to say how taken aback they were by the amount of cynicism they've encountered over the ribbon, with ...

Yes, I am sorely tempted to do this. But seeing how MadCap (like Microsoft) sees the ribbon as the way of the future, I will at least put an attempt at learning it. There are some good points about it, even though it may be flawed fundamentally.

One of the new touted features of Flare 8 is the ribbon interface...love it or hate it.

I have to admit that I still have mixed feelings about the ribbon in MS Office 2007--I still curse it half the time. Now I'm afraid I'll be doing the same thing for Flare. Yes, I realize I can switch back to ...

Aha! So it wasn't just me (or my imagination). I find Flare 8 excruciatingly slow to start up--and I just upgraded to a new Core i7 notebook (ranked top 8% worldwide by PCPitstop!) with a freshly installed Win 7 64-bit operating system.

I think MadCap needs to go back to the drawing board in this ...

I just discovered something and I'm back to issue a mea culpa--it would appear that I lead myself in a wild goose chase and that I've raised a non-issue. I'll elaborate a bit in hopes this will spare any other chagrined help author who think they've discovered a drastic bug.

When we send out topics ...

Yes, there is a pattern that I can search and I was going to trudge through it using Flare's search & replace. I've never heard of FAR HTML, but it looks promising.

Thanks for the tip!

Carl

Great tip, dsimov. This definitely gets the job done. The only drawback for me is that I must apply it to thousands of links in our legacy help system that's several hundred topics. :cry: And I must avoid applying it to hyperlinks that lead to bookmarks within the same topic--those I want to keep ...

Thanks for the reference, Nita. It appears that using condition tags is the best solution for now. I quake at the thought of adding conditions to thousands of links in our large help system, but I'll give it a shot. I'll also log a feature request with MadCap and see if it gets anywhere.

Carl

I just discovered an issue that I never gave much thought, but can make us look pretty amateurish in the eyes of our customers... How can I suppress hyperlinks in my PDF output? We single source with Flare, producing both WebHelp and PDF targets. Naturally all the hyperlinks are suppose to work in ...

Hmmm...I don't see a "View links" option when I right-click on a snippet. But I found another solution: simply search for the "snippetName.flsnp" in code using "Find in Files" and it will list all the topics containing the snippet.

This would be a nice feature to add to Analyzer.

Carl

Does anyone know if Analyzer can generate a list of all topics that use a particular snippet? We just realized that some "snippeted" text cannot apply in all situations where the snippet is used, so we must hunt down all occurrences of the snippet and make manual corrections.

Thanks.
Carl

Do you have a "Return to Top" link in there, somewhere (<a href="#">Top</a>)?
Good luck,
Leon

We use "return to top" in other topics, but not in this one. The only other clue I have is that "<fileName>" was created recently, cloned from another topic. It is baffling why Flare would flag a topic ...

Here is a problem that has vexed me all afternoon: I am compiling my project to a PDF target. At the end of the compilation I see this error message:

"Unresolved link(s) to file: <fileName>. File may not be included in the output."

And in the "File" column, it simply shows the full path to ...

I resolved a problem that has vexed us for a long time. I feel so relieved that I thought I'd share it with the forum, in case anyone else runs into it.

We have a 15" notebook with a very high res 1900x1200 display. My writer who took over this machine reset the resolution to 1680x1050 to make it ...

Thanks, Lisa. That's what I feared. Of course, there is the other workaround: move all the captions above the graphic. This way, it's guaranteed that the graphic will be invisible. However, this also means re-captioning hundreds of graphics... :(

I think I'll just leave things the way they are and ...

I'm not sure if there is a resolution to this, but here is my issue: My help project contains graphics with captions beneath. The captions have automatic numbering. Occasionally I will link to a caption with "See Figure 4 below....". Now, everything works as it should--the link works, the caption ...

Whoops--brain cramp on our part. We were trying to open the ".props" file directly from Capture using File > Open, and was puzzled why ".props" wasn't one of the recognized file formats. Turns out all we needed to do was open the .png and the .props information is loaded automatically. It's amazing ...

We have some old screen shots created using Capture 3. These files have .png and .png.props versions. From what I know, the Capture-specific stuff is stored in the .props file. We have now updated to Capture 5 and are attempting to edit the old version 3 files. However Capture 5 will not open the ...

Did you manually enter the font name in the stylesheet or use the Stylesheet Editor to select the font from a list? If you manually typed the font in the stylesheet file, make sure you put single quotes around it. Fonts with spaces in the name need to be contained in single quotes.

I selected the ...

I use Firefox 4. I'm not sure about client-side overrides--I don't think there's any. How do I check?

ChoccieMuffin: Thanks for the tip! I updated all my styles involving Arial Black and am now getting Arial in Firefox. Still not what I want, but at least it's better than Times Roman showing up.

RamonS: Yes, I am running Firefox on the same system as IE and Chrome. Still can't understand why FF ...

Here is something that has vexed me for some time now: I use the font "Arial Black" in my Flare projects for headings and notes. When compiled in WebHelp, the Arial Black text displays correctly in IE and Chrome...but in Firefox it stubbornly shows up as Times Roman!

In my master stylesheet, I was ...

Thanks, Dave. I guess it makes sense when you think about it. But the change in behaviour from Flare 6 is kind of annoying and it causes extra work for what I'm trying to do. Your workaround will do, but like you said, it's not ideal.

Here's a minor little annoyance I've discovered since upgrading to Flare 7: I normally have my project target set to WebHelp; as a result (I think) my topics always display as medium "non print". However I have some special formatting and I want my topics to appear as medium "Default", to make it ...

For the first time since switching to Flare, we will soon have a second tech writer join the team. I'd like to hear your hints, tips, and best practices on multiple writers working on the same project using Flare.

In a previous company, we used a somewhat kludgy workaround with RoboHelp that ...