Customizing the Online Help?

[Becca_2017]

Hey everyone,

the company I am working for is currently looking for a tool to write and publish an online help for the software we are developing.

So, we have some things we would like to have in our online help and I wanted to ask if you could do that with MadCap:

1. customizing the online help by adding additional topics? I mean that the customer is able to add his own topics to the online help. Since our software is highly customizable and we are providing only a standard online help, it would help our customers to edit the online help according to their needs plus editing the index afterwards.

2. selecting different topics from the TOC to add them to a pdf file?

I have done some research and found this "Pulse" software that includes a lot of functionalities we could use on top. So, my preference would be MadCap Flare. And if the requirements mentioned above could be fulfilled it would be incredibly awesome!!! that would solve so many problems

I hope some one can help me...

Oh, and just in case my topic is in the wrong section, would someone please put it into the right section? Thanks!

Becca

[RamonS]

As far as I know (but I do not know everything) it is a "No" for both. The first item seems more to be like a wiki, a standard set of articles is provided, then the customer can do whatever they want with it. There is currently no direct way for Flare to publish to Wikis, but there are tools that can take Flare output and convert it to wiki. A while back I used a plugin for MS Word, LibreOffice can natively output to MediaWiki format. There are various wiki platforms, I bet there are a few that look a bit nicer than MediaWiki.

Item 2 will require sending the selection back to the server where the topics are bundled and combined into a PDF file for download. I bet there are ways to do it, but I don't think Flare can do this out of the box.

That said, wait a few days and see if others chime in. Maybe someone faced this same issue and came up with a solution.