Hi All,
My company is trying to move to more modern approach for their documentation needs than just MS Word and PDF outputs. We are having a tough time deciding between Flare and Doc-to-help. I have already read the comparison provided by the Madcap team (https://www.madcapsoftware.com/products ... c-to-help/). Is there anything more that I can add to the comparison based on the user experience?
Flare vs Doc-to-help
Re: Flare vs Doc-to-help
I haven't used the MadCap Doc-to-Help (D2H), but I used D2H a long time ago and it looks like the same general product approach has been preserved through multiple owning companies and product versions since that time.
Doc-to-Help is primarily for manual writers who want a quick fix for generating some kind of help out of a dumped version of their manual. In D2H you write your content in Word, in (roughly) the same way you'd write a manual. You're using a Word add-in all the time, with all that that entails. The help build process is long and arduous, comparable to the PDF generation from help, except that since it is running under the overhead of Word, it's even slower, and if your workflow includes building the help regularly, you spend even more time waiting for this. I wouldn't advise using it for large, complex documents or anything where you are using the conditional text features to make help that significantly differs from the manual. There is a separate Doc-to-Help forum on this site where you should be able to find people who have used the current MadCap D2H and can determine whether any of these drawbacks have been fixed, but I feel that they are mostly architectural issues that can't be fixed while keeping the D2H workflow.
Flare is a modern, robust help authoring system. You edit individual topics as XHTML files in a sort-of-WYSIWYG editor with optional code view. The help build is much faster than any comparably sized thing involving Word. Word is out of the loop entirely; Flare generates PDFs directly. This will be a much greater change for you than D2H if you are coming from a world where you only wrote manuals in Word and generated PDFs from Word, but it gives much greater flexibility and robustness and is much better able to handle large (> 1000 topic) help systems and systems where you want to make help that is something other than simply a manual dumped into help topics.
Doc-to-Help is primarily for manual writers who want a quick fix for generating some kind of help out of a dumped version of their manual. In D2H you write your content in Word, in (roughly) the same way you'd write a manual. You're using a Word add-in all the time, with all that that entails. The help build process is long and arduous, comparable to the PDF generation from help, except that since it is running under the overhead of Word, it's even slower, and if your workflow includes building the help regularly, you spend even more time waiting for this. I wouldn't advise using it for large, complex documents or anything where you are using the conditional text features to make help that significantly differs from the manual. There is a separate Doc-to-Help forum on this site where you should be able to find people who have used the current MadCap D2H and can determine whether any of these drawbacks have been fixed, but I feel that they are mostly architectural issues that can't be fixed while keeping the D2H workflow.
Flare is a modern, robust help authoring system. You edit individual topics as XHTML files in a sort-of-WYSIWYG editor with optional code view. The help build is much faster than any comparably sized thing involving Word. Word is out of the loop entirely; Flare generates PDFs directly. This will be a much greater change for you than D2H if you are coming from a world where you only wrote manuals in Word and generated PDFs from Word, but it gives much greater flexibility and robustness and is much better able to handle large (> 1000 topic) help systems and systems where you want to make help that is something other than simply a manual dumped into help topics.