"Real" quotation marks

[forfear]

I thought I wrote a wish list for a 'Press-driven' version of Blaze earlier this morning to this very topic. Alas.
Guess it didn't make it to the forums.

Thanks to whoever made a mention that the Press product is nowhere on the site anymore.

A wish list for a 'press-like' version of Blaze.
- For Tables, easier way to convert rows to Header/Footer/Body rows.
For example, Select top row, right-click and select Convert to Header.

- Industry CMYK, Spot colour swatch support. Support for different industry standard colour profiles/swatches i.e. Pantone, Uncoated, etc.

- Printer's crop marks and bleed marks.

- Drag/drop rules and guides

- 'Cropping' an image is simply a resizing of the viewable bounding box constraining an image. Edges of image outside the resized bounding box are easily recoverable by resizing the box.

- Finer, more responsive, accurate positioning controls of objects on a page. Show bounding box of all objects on a page layout if required for easier object selection.

- DPI and pixels issues are no longer a major concern for most users. the case of 'incredible exploding images' taking users by surprise when print/online outputs are used are no longer the case. Perhaps a standard DPI is automatically enforced when images are dragged to a particular Page Layout....i.e. the master DPI.

- Data Automation- automatic type fitting of regularly updated content from a database/spreadsheet is pumped into a fully formatted Flare table with correct formatting applied to rows, headers, body cells.

- Formatting rules. i.e. if X happens, do formatting for first 2 words in a line.

- More accurate,stable, control of object fitting to text flow.

[cbdebris]

As a workaround you can add the Unicode characters for opening and closing quotes and single quotes.

Tedious? Maybe, but it gets the desired result.

Flare needs support for .NET 3.x to render them on the fly.

[rekiwi]

Yay. Flare doesn't bark when you add numbered entities.

Boo. The XML Editor quietly replaces all of your numbered entities with the Unicode. For example, “ is saved as a UTF-16 character.

Reasons why this is a bummer:

1. Flare declares the XHTML as UTF-8. Why declare the doc UTF-8 and then stuff it full of UTF-16 characters?
2. So many tools/browsers don't play well with UTF-16 characters. We're well into the 21st century and I still see webpages with funky strings of characters where smart quotes should be.
3. This "I know what you want better than you" behavior reminds me of RoboHelp. *twitch*

Why oh why is it so difficult to just let the numbered entities be?

[doc_guy]

3. This "I know what you want better than you" behavior reminds me of RoboHelp. *twitch*

And Microsoft...

[doc_guy]

A wish list for a 'press-like' version of Blaze.
[...]
- 'Cropping' an image is simply a resizing of the viewable bounding box constraining an image. Edges of image outside the resized bounding box are easily recoverable by resizing the box.
[...]
- Formatting rules. i.e. if X happens, do formatting for first 2 words in a line.[...]

All good ideas in your list, but I only want to comment on two of them specifically.

First, the cropping method you specify is the native behavior in MadCap Capture. Theoretically, you'd want to use Capture anyway, since you are creating images for print and online output, and Capture lets you do that easily.

Second, I'm not sure how you would do that, as that isn't supported by CSS, and Flare's formatting is controlled by CSS (which is a good thing... it means your files are not proprietary, and you can take your content to another tool anytime you might need to).

[forfear]

A wish list for a 'press-like' version of Blaze.
[...]
- 'Cropping' an image is simply a resizing of the viewable bounding box constraining an image. Edges of image outside the resized bounding box are easily recoverable by resizing the box.
[...]
- Formatting rules. i.e. if X happens, do formatting for first 2 words in a line.[...]

All good ideas in your list, but I only want to comment on two of them specifically.

First, the cropping method you specify is the native behavior in MadCap Capture. Theoretically, you'd want to use Capture anyway, since you are creating images for print and online output, and Capture lets you do that easily.

Second, I'm not sure how you would do that, as that isn't supported by CSS, and Flare's formatting is controlled by CSS (which is a good thing... it means your files are not proprietary, and you can take your content to another tool anytime you might need to).

Glad it helps/
The thing about image bounding boxes comes from some of the page design/layout programs -i.e. when you insert an image on a page, as you drag the edges of the bounding box of the picture - it hides any edges of the picture that fall outside the smaller box. if you expand the box, the hidden edges now reappear accordingly to the larger expanded box.

this is a post i made a long time ago. can't believe that we're nearing the end of 2009 so fast. and windows 7 is already out on us. wow!

[QuadraQ]

Does Flare 7 finally support this?

[Nita Beck]

Does Flare 7 finally support this?

I don't believe so.

[wbrisett]

Does Flare 7 finally support this?

I don't believe so.

At the Austin Roadshow I mentioned a few of the longer standing bugs, which were related to the version of .net Flare is built on. I was told (along with those present) that the next full version of Flare would be built on a newer version of the .net framework. That may fix certain parts of this issue (entity names vs. entity values), but may not automatically swap out the curly quotes for straight quotes. I think that's a MadCap implementation rather than framework issue.

Wayne

[kathryngz]

So now we're up to Flare 10 and I'd like to revisit this topic. I just got some translated documents back that are literally filled with "undeclared" entities. Search and replace is not an option, both because of the number of entities and the high probability of error (i.e., something unexpectedly getting replaced in the process that shouldn't have been).

It looks like Flare has not fixed this bug yet, but surely there should be a way to declare these entities. Has anyone found a way?

[ChoccieMuffin]

kathryn, I have to admit I'd be bouncing things back at your suppliers...