Technical writers need better tools. The Knowledge Management team at Intelerad has taken a step in this direction that we want to share with the Flare and technical writing communities.
We’ve been using MadCap Flare, also a better tool, since 2013. We like its simplicity and flexibility, including its use of XML and HTML. We took advantage of these things by building a tool that scans a MadCap Flare project for conformance to our style guide.
It's a modest tool but it helps us a lot, saving us production time, improving quality, and even training newbies. This tool doesn't overlap with MadCap Analyzer, but is really a complement to it. Example: our tool reports an error when a topic doesn't start with an h1 element.
We call this tool FlareLint and we’re releasing it under an open source license:
http://www.intelerad.com/flarelint/
System requirements:
- MadCap Flare 8. It should work well with higher versions.
- Microsoft Windows 7 or higher.
- a Windows account with privileges to install software
- Python 3. Instructions to install it are in the FlareLint documentation.