migrating from Flare to Docbook

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Isleofgough
Propeller Head
Posts: 91
Joined: Sat Dec 08, 2012 9:05 am
Location: Seattle WA

migrating from Flare to Docbook

Post by Isleofgough »

I've had a love hate relationship with Flare for the past six or so years. It is a great HAT program, but falls short for me with pdf and ePub outputs. I have several books that I've created. Over the years, I've migrated most of them from InDesign or Framemaker to Flare. With one of the more complex ones, I could never get the TOC to format the way I wanted in Flare and could not get a solution from MadCap. I've also had a lot of cleanup to do with ePubs generated from Flare and have never gotten satisfactory solutions from tech support. Going back to InDesign or Framemaker for these would not have worked due to complex graphics with need for bibliographic cross-references, external web links, mathematical formulas, and internal cross refererences. In the end, I've migrated this book to LaTeX - which solves all my needs for pdf output. However, I still need a better solution for ePubs. Flare brings over all print related CSS designations into ePubs and also adds additional CSS designations if you have any tables. The ePub can be a bit of a mess when examined in Sigil/Jutoh/etc.

Have any of you migrated from MadCap Flare to Oxygen XML, specifically with converting documents to Docbook standard? I realize Flare allows a lot more flexibility, but at the expense of potential bad structure (you can add a heading 2 before a heading 1 at the beginning of a document, for instance or have a list that has just one element). What issues did you encounter? Did you use this for ePub outputs? I am specifically looking for both better structure and cleaner code with a different approach.
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