Newbie question on using Flare and developer documentation

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MeteorcommMe
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Newbie question on using Flare and developer documentation

Post by MeteorcommMe »

Greetings all,

I'm a Flare newbie. My company is small (currently two technical writers) and our management wants us to move from documenting in Word with final output of PDFs to Flare. We want to single source and potentially move our customers to an online world (wow! you say - think government regulated agencies). Additionally, the manager of the devs and engineers doesn't want them having to worry about formatting (which I don't want them messing with either). Her idea is to have things like commands and APIs written plain text files (in Notepad or markdown) and I pull that into Flare.

I find that Flare can't accept .txt files so I have the idea to create a form in Word that the devs fill out. I can then pull that into Flare, but is there a way to pull the tags from the Word form as styles or tags into Flare? I've taken some Flare training, but I think I know just enough to create the worst possible solution.

This can't be a new concept...how have you dealt with it?

Many thanks!!
MeteorcommMe, boldly stepping into the Flare universe
wclass
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Location: Melbourne, Australia

Re: Newbie question on using Flare and developer documentati

Post by wclass »

If your engineers can use Markdown then get them to write in that. There are tools that convert Markdown to HTML that comes into Flare nicely.
Pandoc does a good job - see https://pandoc.org/

If you are going to bring Word into the mix, get the engineers to write into a template with pre-set styles - if they stick to the template (which is harder to get people to do in Word), then doing an import to Flare is quite straight forward. It would be possible to set up a form, and the form fields could be styled, so they could be pulled into Flare, but I think this would be a lot more work in the long run.
Margaret Hassall - Melbourne
AlexFox
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Re: Newbie question on using Flare and developer documentati

Post by AlexFox »

Also worth looking into Contributor, designed pretty much for this situation. You can set up a template in that so they don't need to worry about styles and everything will import straight into Flare.
ChoccieMuffin
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Re: Newbie question on using Flare and developer documentati

Post by ChoccieMuffin »

If you use a Word template, make sure you restrict the styles that can be used. To do this:
  • 1. Click File and on the Backstage view click Protect Document then click Restrict Editing. A Restrict Editing pane appears (usually on the right-hand side).
    2. In the Restrict Editing pane select the Limit formatting to a selection of styles check box and click Settings. The Formatting Restrictions dialog box appears.
    3. In the Formatting Restrictions dialog box select the Limit formatting to a selection of styles check box, select the styles you want to allow them to use, then click OK.
    4. In the Restrict Editing pane click Yes, Start Enforcing Protection, and add a password if you want one. (I don't bother as I see the restriction as something to help them, rather than me being "Nanny".)
Hope that's useful.
Started as a newbie with Flare 6.1, now using Flare 2023.
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MeteorcommMe
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Joined: Mon Aug 24, 2015 10:20 am
Location: Pacific Northwest

Re: Newbie question on using Flare and developer documentati

Post by MeteorcommMe »

Thanks all. These suggestions will help quite a bit.
MeteorcommMe, boldly stepping into the Flare universe
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