Should I create a Word target INSTEAD of PDF?

[Curlyshell]

Flare's PDF target seems so full of bugs, I'm considering creating a Word target instead and then exporting from PDF to Word. (I'm lucky to have Adobe Acrobat).

Flare has trouble rendering styled text (see viewtopic.php?f=10&t=32013), and the TOC is funky (see viewtopic.php?f=10&t=27679), and now I can't get images with borders to do anything right at all.

But before I embark on what's likely to be a similarly rocky journey—as all MadCap journeys seem to be—can anyone tell me how bad it is to create Word targets that actually work?

I appreciate your insights!

[ChoccieMuffin]

All I can say is, Flare and Word don't play nice. So don't expect to get anything like pretty in your Word output - you'll probably end up having to do lots of post-export formatting in Word before you can create a PDF.

(Can you tell I really don't like Word? )

I hope you get some comments that are a bit more useful than that, but I'm just warning that you aren't suggesting a simple solution.

[smajors]

I use the Word target rarely and only for one-off documents that don't necessarily need to be housed in my Flare project and don't need to be linked or cross-referenced anywhere (because it doesn't need to be published from Flare to any of my publishing targets like html).

I created a Word template with heading styles that mimic what CSS I use in Flare to adhere to our style guide. However, like the previous poster mentioned, there's some formatting cleanup you may need to do so it can be time consuming. For example, we use bordered and colored note styles that don't transfer well, and I've found some of the styling such as bold font doesn't transfer.

Also, from my experience, the image quality isn't the best either. I personally remove the images from the Word doc and find the original image then copy/paste it into the Word document and the quality is much better that way. I've had issues with correcting page breaks and spacing of list items, etc. Word wouldn't be too bad to use on occasion but I wouldn't recommend it for a large amount of documents.

[Curlyshell]

Thanks—I was hoping to hear honest opinions.

I'm fixing the border issues by putting my own borders on the darned images. The rest of the problems I can get around. I look forward to someday when some of these bugs are fixed.

Appreciate all the input!

[wclass]

I follow a similar process to the others. We create Word targets first, mainly because we have more control.

We already have substantial Word templates, with images, backgrounds, boxes, etc in corporate brand styles, and did not want to have to recreate in Flare.
We generate a basic Word target - links to an empty a4 master page - then copy/paste the generated content into our existing template. Run a couple of find/replace macros to change from html (H1) styles to Word (Heading 1) styles. Most of this is now automated and it all works well. Will generate PDF from that if needed.

[robdocsmith]

I produce quite complicated PDF output and haven't found it difficult to work with. Like most things in Flare, in whatever output you choose, there's usually a work around to fix issues, or at worst, make them so you can live with the solution. I do from time to time output to Word so people can review text. I've found Word output so unlike the PDF that I have to advise people to ignore formatting and just get on with text review!

I've never had the Contents issue because I embed my TOC proxy on a page with a Contents heading. Formatting of Contents seems intuitive and clean. I do have that issue when starting a new project where some headings were included when I didn't want them to - until I remember to set

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mc-heading-level

back to 0 for those heading styles. I like how you can set widows and orphans to control to some extent the pagination of contents entries.

I'm not sure what your border issue is with images, can you explain a little more? I slapped a

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border: 2mm solid #FF0000;

on my img class and got a big red border around all images in the document in PDF. But generally my images already include a border in the image itself where I need one.

What are some of your specific PDFing issues?

Cheers,

Rob