What's the single biggest Flare project you've had to manage

[crdmerge]

42-project merged WebHelp, 3200 topics (over 700 are above 10KB), 6200 images, over 13,000 hyperlinks.

Times two, for two substantially different release versions (the consensus of eight writers was to keep them separate instead of falling into conditional chaos).

[trent the thief]

@wbrisett: Interesting. I have just run into this issue via another thread.

http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... a&start=15

So, it seems that, after importing 5300 topics from FrameMaker, I'm now going to have to split my project? Not good...

Do you have trouble generating merged projects?

I've never had any issue with compiling massive projects. I'm using Flare at a second company, now. The first place I used moved to Flare from RoboHelp. The project was ~15k pages divided into many smaller subject areas.

The master project where I now work has about ~15k pages and is growing everyday.

The main issues when doing massive projects is assigning sets of Topic IDs for CSH and final link checking.

If you're bringing a FrameMaker book into Flare, that in itself is an issue. You'll need to decide where you want to do any editing. IMHO, there is no "round-trip" editing process between Flare and FM. If you have taken advantage of FrameMaker's typographic capabilities to set anything beyond a very basic layout, The layout you see after importing into Flare is likely to be disappointing. I maintain more than a dozen books in Flare and have only brought three of them into Flare. I maintain each text stream separately. Acceptable formatting and layout in FrameMaker often does not work so well for a hyperlinked help system. But that is something that gives any webhelp import/conversion a headache, not just Flare.

[owilkes]

Related useful tip...

As managing 17 projects, and merging them together through runtime merging was becoming an administrative headache (as we had to produce in Webhelp, HTML5, Client, Internal, Minimal and Full-Fat - which meant 8 permutations and therefore 8 targets for each project) we created a 'mega-project' that merges everything together, and then builds from there (only import the contents, the tocs, the relationship tables and the snippets - then create new tocs to pull together these tocs, and build). As we've added in our helptext, we're looking at 50,000 topics+ now.

Result? Much faster build times, much faster search inside the content themselves, shorter build paths (don't encoutner the 260-character issue), smaller output size - result!

You need to be careful on the imports, and organise your folders in the sub-projects properly - but if you having headaches with runtime merging, I'd recommend it as an alternative.

One question for people running multiple parallel projects - how do you keep your glossaries, dictionaries, stylesheets in sync, so people can add to the central one & you don't have change control issues?

thanks.

[trent the thief]

For stylesheets, the best system is to put one writer in charge of styles. If you need a new one, it must go to that person to be added to the project.

No one I have worked with has had a lot of luck with repeated imports. Generally that seems to be because of formatting issues. Especially when complex lists are involved, whether ordered or not. Flare is limited by what can easily be accomplished with html. Unfortunately, that's a little to simplistic for very technical works.