Can I replace the Flare XML editor

[doc_guy]

I suggest you figure out what you'd like simplified, then figure out a way you'd like to see it implemented instead and submit an enhancement request. General rants in the forums aren't going to get you very far in terms of finding a solution to your particular problem.

[RamonS]

perhaps a flare editor for dummies (or more to the point, non flare developers) would be useful.

Unfortunately, dumbing the editor down will also dumb the results down. Word's "editor" is pretty much border level to dumb and Word's results are often more a guessing game than a matter of cause and effect. The Flare developers use Microsoft VisualStudio .NET and program in C#. Flare's editor is not a software development IDE, it is for content creation and help generation. It does a lot of things and some functions can be accessed in more than one way. That does add to complexity. I lively recall my first encounters with the Flare editor. Coming from the dumbed down editor that RoboHelp had getting used to Flare's drastically different approach wasn't easy and mastering even the basics took more than just a couple weeks. I think I spent a few months before being capable enough to produce a full blown help system with Flare. Master pages and imports were things that I looked into after a year of using Flare. During all that time I always figured that when I ignore all those things in the editor that I have no clue about (such as those orange boxes at the beginning of a paragraph, the tag blocks in the gutters, the weird white boxes that came in recently) I keep my mind clear for those things that I did know. Later I found that the tag blocks really have some awesome functions behind them, that those orange blocks hold many shortcuts for getting stuff done and even after two and a half years (from which I spent two years breathing Flare on a daily basis) I still learn new things.
You joined the forums on November 26th. Less the holidays and maybe some other time not to be counted you spent two months using Flare. Give yourself and Flare more credit. After my first two months with Flare I was barely capable to create CSH WebHelp so that it would actually work and do what I intended it to do. Way too much time for getting used to a tool you may think, but once you see how things like Master Pages, concept links, and other nifty features come together you really see how much you as a tw grew and how much power this tool gives you. Flare again and again let me things do that I couldn't have done any other way and even better than ever imagined. But as the saying goes: "Rome was not built in a day"...and just see how long the roman buildings lasted. Building a Colloseum isn't particularly easy, but none of the roman architects looked at few stones after two months and said "Screw that, this all sucks, why don't the stones just pile themselves up, why does it have to be so difficult, it should be as easy as building a straw hut". Same with Flare, things don't come easy, but once they are there they impress generations and last forever - and yes, sometimes you need to use the big hammer and whack the pieces into place.

I'm glad the benefits far outweigh the "foibles" but when those "foibles" prevent me from doing what I consider a simple task and instead drive me to either support or user forums when the IDE could have been designed with a little more understanding of the audience, might have been helpful.

Well, which tasks do you think are "simple"? I know you do a lot of Word imports and I think Word imports are the opposite of simple. There are a lot of constellations and all is based on the shaky ground of a Word document that may be riddled with inline styles and other quick patches to make things look the way they should because Word can't do it on its own.

Not all TWs are DEVELOPERS. This might have been a good place to start. We're a mixed bag of background and I'm finding this concept of telling us we can get our work done in an IDE that is written with a developer mentality in mind is a bit annoying. I used to write code, create pretty complicated webpages and sites, but I know the tools I know because I've spent the time to learn them, sure, by that token, I should get to know Flare, which I am. However, the help shouldn't be so counter-intuitive where it points to non-existent topics or just plain wrong topics than what it's meant to explain, and the IDE is so confused/ing that it leaves me hunting for an hour to figure out HOW to break my topics on import from Word (yeah, you know step 3 (or 2) of the Word import "wizard" where it's referred to in Flare as "New Styles" how about something a bit more intuitive here?)), then it's not helping me do my job efficiently. I've got SMEs wondering why it is that it is taking me so long to produce things from an application i had to lobby for. If it wasn't for reading these forums and making sure I had the platinum package, I'd be very very lost.

Come on! Flare is not even close to being as complex as a software development IDE. You should take a look at the Delphi IDE. That made my head spin. Or at the Eclipse stuff that is only nice once you customized the hell out of it. Or Zend Studio that makes me thing a bunch of drunken monkeys designed it.
Flare is designed for the professional technical writer who has sufficient knowledge about context sensitive help and CSS. And yes, Flare is an integrated development environment and yes it is complex at times, but other document tools are as well. For example FrameMaker isn't particularly easy or intuitive to use, but once mastered it is a fine tool (and no, I did not master Frame). In any case, you ARE a developer. CSH is in no way different than program code. My experience of over seven years as a tw is that as soon as you treat documentation in the exact same way as you treat the program code good things happen. And in order to be a good tw you need to learn many things. Do you believe that lead developers in software companies spent three months poking around in the IDE and maybe reading a book before they were able to pull of a big project? Developers typically spent four years in college, attended several training programs, got certifications, and kept on learning. Engineering is a commitment to life long learning and it doesn't matter if you engineer a DLL or WebHelp. A technical writer is an engineer and a developer and one that doesn't just have to talk to a compiler that always understands a code word the same way and always has the same expectations, we tech writers deal with people and language, a combination that brings a lot of ambiguity and complexity with it. Just think about it for a while and you will see that Flare is really a piece of cake in the grand scheme of things.

I do wonder why you lobbied so hard for Flare if you pretty much hate everything about Flare. You said you evaluated it before buying. What did you do during that time? Did you create an evaluation plan that covers the most common scenarios that you know you will come across? It is hard to believe that none of these issues came up during your evaluation. And maybe your SMEs have unrealistic expectations. What a tech writer does it not easy. If it would be that easy companies wouldn't hire tech writers, but some high school kiddie that stuffs the pieces together on an afternoon once a month. If tech writing is that easy and simple companies wouldn't pay 71k on average, but minimum wage. If it would be that trivial the SMEs would just do it themselves. I think overall you try to transpose your frustration of your process to Flare and blame the wizard and the editor for everything that is wrong in tech writing world. Did you compare various HATs during your evaluation period? Did you look at AuthorIT, DocToHelp, RoboHelp, Frame/WebWorks, and possibly others? Did any of those tools even come close to what Flare offers? Where they easier to use? Where they designed with the future in mind using a very flexible and solid XML foundation? I think Flare wipes the floor with any of them and I used or evaluated them all in the past. Name the tool that can do what you want and I am sure you will get many converts. Good luck searching....

[MikeKatz]

While I agree with most of what you say, I don't agree with this statement:

Flare is designed for the professional technical writer who has sufficient knowledge about context sensitive help and CSS.

I haven't seen anywhere in MadCap's marketing material that you need to know anything about CSS in order to use Flare. I'm not actually sure about the CSH either (not sure what "sufficient knowledge" means in that context), but the Flare documentation and the marketing material, as far as I remember, says that you don't need XML or CSS knowledge.

[doc_guy]

I suppose you don't "need" them in a requirements sense, but if you want to customize your output, you are going to need to learn about them.

And you aren't going to need to understand how CSS works, necessarily. But you are going to need to be willing to play in the sandbox, get a little dirty, and try stuff out to get what you want.

A good resource guide on CSS won't hurt

Can you use Flare without extensive CSS knowledge? Sure. Would it help? You bet. Will a beginner to CSS learn a lot about CSS in the process? Probably.

[RamonS]

My CSS skills are amateurish at best....but I know where to find the experts like Lisa or the other CSS enabled Flare users.

[QBF]

A good resource guide on CSS won't hurt

Paul is correct in that good resource guides are extremely helpful.
Two of the best are:
"Cascading Style Sheets - Designing for the Web" by Hakon Lie and Bert Bos
"Core CSS" by Keith Schengili-Roberts

[Richard Ferrell]

Two of the best are:
"Cascading Style Sheets - Designing for the Web" by Hakon Lie and Bert Bos

Great book, use it all the time!

[KevinDAmery]

Another book you might want to take a look at is "Madcap Flare for Robohelp Users" by Scott DeLoach (look for it on Google Books). It sez it only covers up to Flare 2.5, but the UI for Flare hasn't changed all that much since then (there are a number of new features, but the old ones still work the same way for the most part).

[Richard Ferrell]

Here's a link to Scott DeLoach's book, Scott is one of our Flare Trainers and does alot of online training for us.

http://www.amazon.com/MadCap-Flare-Robo ... 0615141455

[doc_guy]

"Cascading Style Sheets - Designing for the Web" by Hakon Lie and Bert Bos

I bought this book because of this thread, and it is fantastic. A wonderful reference. They even tell you if different elements are supported across browsers.

Did you know that this book was written in HTML, styled with CSS, and then sent directly to press? They did ALL of their styles with CSS. This is what Flare can do for you, people, if you learn enough about how to create wicked CSS print styles. They use a program called "Prince" to convert the HTML/CSS directly to PDF.

If you are interested, here are some references:

http://www.princexml.com/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/boom
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcXUrNSvjhU

Can I say: wow?!

[iand]

I think Flare has a little way to go to match Prince in the PDF CSS stakes. Prince is Acid2 compliant; this a strict test for CSS compatibility. Firefox and Opera pass the test as does Internet Explorer 8. Internet Explorer 7 fails. I hope Flare PDF output gets to this level soon. To be fair, Prince is purely a tool for generating PDF from XHTML and CSS whereas Flare does a lot more.

[forfear]

Revisiting this post more than a year later:

After more than a year, a post like this reminds me, why there are always nuggets of gold in the madcap forums. Some really great posts by RamonS, DocGuy and amberlink.

In fact, a rare display of praise by RamonS, when it comes, it comes in one massive heaping pile

Building a Colloseum isn't particularly easy, but none of the roman architects looked at few stones after two months and said "Screw that, this all sucks, why don't the stones just pile themselves up, why does it have to be so difficult, it should be as easy as building a straw hut". Same with Flare, things don't come easy, but once they are there they impress generations and last forever - and yes, sometimes you need to use the big hammer and whack the pieces into place!

What a quote!

I think Flare has a little way to go to match Prince in the PDF CSS stakes. Prince is Acid2 compliant; this a strict test for CSS compatibility. Firefox and Opera pass the test as does Internet Explorer 8. Internet Explorer 7 fails. I hope Flare PDF output gets to this level soon. To be fair, Prince is purely a tool for generating PDF from XHTML and CSS whereas Flare does a lot more.

"Cascading Style Sheets - Designing for the Web" by Hakon Lie and Bert Bos

I bought this book because of this thread, and it is fantastic. A wonderful reference. They even tell you if different elements are supported across browsers.

Did you know that this book was written in HTML, styled with CSS, and then sent directly to press? They did ALL of their styles with CSS. This is what Flare can do for you, people, if you learn enough about how to create wicked CSS print styles. They use a program called "Prince" to convert the HTML/CSS directly to PDF.

Can I say: wow?!

Thank you and for the book references

[forfear]

Oh yes, and Scott of ClickStart has a book on CSS as well now.