continued ePub issues

[Isleofgough]

I am coming up for renewal of Madcap Flare. I've stopped using it for new projects due to some issues with pdf and ePub outputs. I have to maintain double bibliographies for ePub and pdf targets based on how Flare handles cross-references to paragraphs vs lists. The math equations in generated targets are problematic and not particularly nice looking. Tables in ePubs are a disaster. But most importantly, the ePubs generated from Flare get rejected by Barnes and Noble and Amazon Kindle regularly and require extensive cleanup of sloppy code. I've switched all ePub projects to OxygenXML, which always generated clean ePub output. This issue with Flare has gone on unfixed for several years. I hope Madcap will address this in a future release for the benefit of others.

[ChoccieMuffin]

I suggest you add this comment verbatim as a feature request. Or email MadCap directly to let them know why you're not using it, and unlikely to renew your subscription. They need to know.

[Isleofgough]

Thank you. I submitted a request for new "feature". Unfortunately, aside from fixing the compressed mime attachment issue with epubs, Madcap never addressed any of the other code issues. One easy fix would be to strip out of the CSS file all designations not pertinent to an epub - like the sections on print and tablet designations. Even so, there is a lot of junk code, which you can see in Oxygen, Calibre, Sigil, etc.

[Isleofgough]

Unfortunately, I never got a response to the suggestion from MadCap. There are several things that I doubt would be difficult to implement that would improve Flare. For instance, In OxygenXML, I can cross-reference to an ordered or unordered list element. In Flare, I only figured out a way of cross-referencing to a paragraph. I can create a list-type paragraph style with tabs and indents, but that is not ideal in ePub or HTML outputs where tabs and indents have to be relative rather than absolute. My workaround in Flare for single sourcing is to maintain double topics, one with a list and the other with a paragraph style looking like a list. The ePub has to use one TOC and the pdf another. This is annoying when I need to add or subtract something from these lists because I need to update the changes in two files.