Flare 8 Niggles

[Paul Griffiths]

I can't reposition items in my workspace any more. If I float the Index window, for example, no drop icons appear for me to drop it on to. Anyone else seeing this?

[bbolt]

Flare support told me that ePub does not support drop downs and tables within drop downs. This should have been stated in the release notes.

[sarrants]

Flare support told me that ePub does not support drop downs and tables within drop downs. This should have been stated in the release notes.

It doesn't look like Flare supports the EPUB 3 format (yet). There's an overview of EPUB 3 features here http://blog.bookbaby.com/2011/10/epub-3 ... ok-format/
The official spec is at http://idpf.org/epub/30

[LTinker68]

I can't reposition items in my workspace any more. If I float the Index window, for example, no drop icons appear for me to drop it on to. Anyone else seeing this?

No, I see icons to drop onto, although they're not as big as before and the appearance has changed slightly. What's annoying is that 1) it no longer moves just the one item in the pane but all the tools in the pane (e.g., instead of just floating Index, you could end up moving Index, Styles, and FAR), and 2) when you snap it back, it goes to a tab effect instead of the default accordion so you have to reselect the accordion option.

[NorthEast]

I can't reposition items in my workspace any more. If I float the Index window, for example, no drop icons appear for me to drop it on to. Anyone else seeing this?

Other people have had this issue (here), the solution was:

Per guidance from Madcap Support, what did resolve it was: In Control Panel —> Performance Information and Tools —> Adjust Visual Effect, select Adjust for best appearance, then click Apply.

No, I see icons to drop onto, although they're not as big as before and the appearance has changed slightly. What's annoying is that 1) it no longer moves just the one item in the pane but all the tools in the pane (e.g., instead of just floating Index, you could end up moving Index, Styles, and FAR), and 2) when you snap it back, it goes to a tab effect instead of the default accordion so you have to reselect the accordion option.

For (1), drag using the icons on the right of the accordion tabs to move them out of the pane; rather than using the icon in the top left of the pane, as that drags the whole pane. For (2), maybe you've changed a setting, mine always revert to accordions by default.

[LTinker68]

No, I see icons to drop onto, although they're not as big as before and the appearance has changed slightly. What's annoying is that 1) it no longer moves just the one item in the pane but all the tools in the pane (e.g., instead of just floating Index, you could end up moving Index, Styles, and FAR), and 2) when you snap it back, it goes to a tab effect instead of the default accordion so you have to reselect the accordion option.

For (1), drag using the icons on the right of the accordion tabs to move them out of the pane; rather than using the icon in the top left of the pane, as that drags the whole pane. For (2), maybe you've changed a setting, mine always revert to accordions by default.

1) Weird. I wasn't getting that icon on the right the first few times I tried. I think it was switching it to the tab view which didn't include that option. After trying this just now about 3 or 4 times the icon finally showed up. 2) Nope, didn't change anything, except I keep trying to reorder the accordions so that they're not alphabetical, but it always reverts to alphabetical when I restart Flare. Perhaps rearranging the accordions screwed something up.

[dberman]

I've logged a bug report about this, but has anyone else noticed that search terms aren't highlighted in topics in HTML5 outputs? I even created the span classes mentioned in the help, but no go. I tried it MadCap's Flare 8 online help, too, and don't see highlighting either. I'm wondering if the intention was to not offer that option, because there's no associated toolbar icon for turning off highlighting like there is for WebHelp.

Was wondering about this myself...you can always instruct readers to press Ctrl+F, but this isn't a serious solution...a shame...

[i-tietz]

Reading the whole of this thread everything looks familiar ... developers just LOVE new toys to play with ... instead of listening to users or watching them, they think they know it all and far better than anyone else ... our developers are the same and almost all other developers I came across before ...

So we get ribbons, bright colours, round corners and new output formats ... and nothing works ... and it's not even faster than before but slower ...

[crdmerge]

Inge, the software business is like all others: decisions filter down from the top. That is, developers are often only implementing the bad decisions of marketing, product managers, VP's of Engineering, Development, Design, Boards of Directors, Owners, and on and on and...

Yes, developers might go a little overboard with toys, but they're not entirely responsible for repeated instances of Update Vaporware Syndrome.


Leon

[Phlawm53]

I'm going to pick up a few bits and pieces from preceding posts in this thread, integrate them into my own experience across the past three weeks or so, and come out and say that the Flare 8 user interface behaves unpredictably by design. AND is buggy, too.

For a start, I'm NOT necessarily unhappy with the Ribbon per se. It's sub-optimal in some ways but at least it, unlike many of its Flare 8 u.i. relatives, doesn't change shape or move itself to new locations as I'm working.

Otherwise, working with the Flare 8 u.i. feels like trying to write documentation while confined in a small room with an especially rambunctious polar bear cub. Despite being a skilled computer user since 1981, and having used Flare 8 for almost three weeks, I still find myself stopping what I'm doing to move a tool back to where I last placed it; re-re-re-sizing a tool that has yet again shape-shifted; struggling(!) to separate tools that Flare 8 has for some reason decided to conjoin; and so on.

OK, annoying u.i. behaviors that are, like it or not, working as designed is one thing. But the Flare 8 u.i. is also more than a little buggy.

I've had the Flare 8 u.i. literally disintegrate in front my eyes: When moving a given tool or panel (which I'm often doing solely because Flare 8 has yet again decided to put the tool where I didn't want it), I've had the working part of the tool or panel "slip out" of the Windows u.i. frame. At that point the tool, stripped of its Windows title bar or any other U.I. controls, can't be moved or closed. So I'm compelled me to close and restart Flare 8. It doesn't happen often, but why does it need to happen at all?

I still basically like Flare 8 and desperately want it to work the way I believe it was probably meant to. To that end, I strongly believe that Madcap needs to sit some users down in front of Flare 8 and use-test the U.I. Then use-test it some more. Then use-test it even more.

Rigorous use-testing may enable Madcap to rationalize what appears at this point to be the Flare 8 u.i.'s designed-in irrationality. It may also enable the company to see with its own eyes some of the more spectacular u.i. bugs that have obviously slipped through Madcap's QA processes…

Cheers & thanks for listening,
Riley
SFO

[crdmerge]

Personally, the idea of "moving tools" in the UI? I just don't get why anyone needs to do that! But then, I started at DEC using an early markup language, DSR-Plus (aka, Runoff) on a black (actually, a nice shade of teal) screen. But I do like the Quick Access toolbar!

My concerns with Flare are with the functionality that isn't. That is, when working with multiple writers and a very large merged project, and needing specific modifications to the finished product, Flare provides very little help for under-the-covers trickery. Other products provide the ability to manipulate the supporting files (manual edits, copying flat files across all child projects, etc.). Flare support, unfortunately, has repeatedly acknowledged these deficiencies (with potential future fixes) and suggested reworking output files to achieve the desired results. Hey, people, we're working with 8 writers, 42 projects, and ~3K topics (doubled for 2 production versions), Subversion for our Flare projects and Perforce for our output to get into the build (along with extra folders for various non-htm stuff from several databases), and you want us to muck around in the output? Please...

One good example of what I'm talking about is the External Resources feature (for our style sheet, master pages, table stylesheets, snippets, topic templates, etc.): there is no ability to copy/paste text strings in the Map Files and Folders window, either through the UI or via flat files. This inability forces users to actually step through the folder structure one directory at a time, one mouse click at a time, for each file (once in the Project column and once in the External column). It would have been nice to copy/paste strings from a text (.flxres?) file, at least.

For example, in the Map Files and Folders window, for each folder/file:

1. Click a grid cell 2 times to start.
2. Click for the Project Files up to 4 times, click for the External Files up to 6 times (stepping thru the directory structures).

Average amount of clicks for each folder is 8, average amount of clicks for each file is 10.

For 2 folders and 9 separate files, the total per project is 106; for 40 projects, the total is 4240.

And don't get me started on why Flare can't synch the XML Editor and the Text Editor; other products do that! If I select a word/phrase in the XML Editor, why do I have to scroll through up to 2K lines of code to find that content (for example, row 23 in the fifth table of the topic)? Why should I have to do a Find/Replace to get there, only to have Flare not find the phrase because it's been split between two lines? Yikes!

Then there's the inconsistent search highlighting for group synonyms, the inability to customize the stop-list, Search Filters not working in merged help, the inability to remove the Rank column from the Search results window, the inability to include external files in a Related Topics control, no option to have an internal mini-TOC (the headings inside the active topic only), inconsistent treatment of JavaScript rollovers, incomplete treatment of renaming a copy of a table stylesheet, etc. Granted, it's nice getting prompt and pleasant responses to bug reports I've submitted, but many of these were reported last year and didn't get addressed in Flare 8. Besides, how much post-production reworking should Flare expect from its users? And just who has been testing the product, all along? Sure doesn't seem as if they've been using anyone with long-term experience with large projects.

Kudos, however, for List Actions (especially the Make Paragraph Item(s) option!), Table Stylesheets, drop-downs, thumbnail images: good stuff, Flare!


Leon

[NorthEast]

One good example of what I'm talking about is the External Resources feature (for our style sheet, master pages, table stylesheets, snippets, topic templates, etc.): there is no ability to copy/paste text strings in the Map Files and Folders window, either through the UI or via flat files. This inability forces users to actually step through the folder structure one directory at a time, one mouse click at a time, for each file (once in the Project column and once in the External column). It would have been nice to copy/paste strings from a text (.flxres?) file, at least.

For example, in the Map Files and Folders window, for each folder/file:

1. Click a grid cell 2 times to start.
2. Click for the Project Files up to 4 times, click for the External Files up to 6 times (stepping thru the directory structures).

You can't paste directly into the cells (step 1), but you can paste (the path) in the File name box when you select the path (step 2).

If you wanted to edit the mappings in a text editor, they're stored in the project flprj file.

[crdmerge]

Yes, Dave, they're "stored in" the .flprj file, but they cannot be manually added to the .flprj file.

Well, they can, but Flare won't acknowledge and implement them if it didn't put them there itself, through the UI. Believe me, I tried that!


Leon

[NorthEast]

Yes, Dave, they're "stored in" the .flprj file, but they cannot be manually added to the .flprj file.

Well, they can, but Flare won't acknowledge and implement them if it didn't put them there itself, through the UI. Believe me, I tried that!


Leon

I didn't try editing them; interesting, wonder where it's actually stored.

[lmhundley]

Where did the Editor identifier icons go?
V7 had a "black dot" icon for the XML Editor, and used the MSIE icon for the Text Editor.
These came in handy for me, especially with the number of files I keep open and looking at the dropdown list.
In V8, the MSIE icon is used for both editors.
Now, I have a 50/50 chance of chosing the correct file I want to edit with what I want to edit it with.

[doc_guy]

My project has many email links. When I build it as HTML5, I get a warning for each one: "Topic contains a topic popup to an email address. Topic popup will be converted to a hyperlink." <snip>

I know, but I'm going to put in a defect report on this. It's too easy to miss a real, important warning when I have a couple of hundred bogus warnings on every build.

Agreed. I ended up removing the e-mail link and pointed people to a contact form instead, which is probably better practice anyway to keep your e-mail safe from harvesters.

[doc_guy]

Flare support told me that ePub does not support drop downs and tables within drop downs. This should have been stated in the release notes.

That is dumb. If the limitation is because of ePub, then expand the drop-downs automatically like you do if you are publishing to Word, PDF, Framemaker, etc.

I mean, Support doesn't say, "Well, you can't use text drop-downs if you want to publish to PDF or Word, so sorry." Instead, there is an option in the output on what to do with expanding text. (In PDF, you can choose to convert to footnotes, expand text inline, or remove it.) Why can't ePub output mimic functionality already there for PDF?

That makes ePub output almost worthless until it is fixed.

[doc_guy]

My niggles:

1. So-called "HTML5" output is NOT HTML5. It's XHTML with a modified frame set (and it still uses an iframe to display topic content, not something reasonable/modern like ajax calls). I suppose they call it "HTML5" because it uses some features from CSS3 like rounded corners and background gradients -- but those are CSS3 features and have absolutely nothing to do with HTML5. I can't find ANYTHING in the "HTML5" output that makes it HTML5. The name is misleading at best.

Along those lines, when MC says that you can't do search result highlighting in "HTML5" they are not talking about the HTML5 coding standard. They are talking about functionality THEY proactively removed from their pseudo-"HTML5" target. The feature doesn't exist in "HTML5" output because MC decided not to put it there. It has nothing to do with actual HTML5.

Can we all agree to use quotes around "HTML5" to show that we are talking about the Flare target, and not the actual HTML5 standard? I've started using air quotes when I discuss this topic in person with other people.

Let me step down off my soapbox here, but I'm bugged that they called the output "HTML5" just to use a marketing buzz word.

2. The "HTML5" compiler mangles the CSS style sheet if you are using more than one @import command in your CSS. If you have two or more, the compiler replaces all the earlier @import commands with the last @import command. So you think you are importing three separate stylesheets, but really you're just importing one, and it is is imported three times. Not cool.

3. The "HTML5" compiler calls your stylesheet first and its own stylesheets after. This means I can't override Flare's styles with my own.

4. There is still no way to restrict inline styles in a project. I want my writers to style content using the CSS/Styles window. I do not want them bolding, italicising, changing fonts, etc. from the Home ribbon. Let me turn that off at a project level, so I can enforce proper styles!

5. There is still no way to import a compiled Flare project and make everything work mostly the same way it did before. I've had to do that twice now (due to incompetence on my part once, and somebody elses' part the second time), and it is a time waster. (But really, it is as result of user error in deleting the project (or losing it somehow) without a proper backup. But I learned my lesson the first time, and it was as painful a lesson the second time, even though it wasn't my fault. Oh well.)

6. Topic toolbars don't work in "HTML5" output. Why did they strip out so many wonderful tools from the "HTML5" output!?!?!

Ok. Rant done.

[RamonS]

Well, HTML5 is not a standard, it is still in the RFC phase. It's like calling slightly updated cell networks "4G".
That said, I'm not disagreeing with the complaints.

[doc_guy]

Well, HTML5 is not a standard, it is still in the RFC phase. It's like calling slightly updated cell networks "4G".
That said, I'm not disagreeing with the complaints.

Fair enough. Just trying to differentiate between the emerging HTML5 markup language and the "HTML5" output created by MadCap, which are two very, very, very different things.

[owenf]

"AS WELL, is there an HTML5 limitation that all color gradients must be vertical? Why can't I have a horizontal or a diagonal gradient on my background or my button/tab/field/??"

this limitation is with Flare's skin editor i think. the last time i tried a horizontal gradient, i ended up having to use a rectangular image instead of the gradient from color to color thing, which i discovered only worked if you were creating a vertical gradient. I think that was Flare 5 i first noticed it, or maybe 6.

owen

[stealth94rt]

Is it just me or does anyone else feel like Flare 8 was released before it was ready? Previous versions (Flare 7 and earlier) seemed to be pretty solid (granted, they had some bugs, but we did not find the number we're seeing in this version).

Based on the number of bugs that we're finding in Flare 8, it feels like this version was pushed out the door to hit some marketing date instead of making sure it was thoroughly tested and ready for release.

[lmhundley]

stealth94rt:
Yeah, I get the same feeling. Previous releases were much more stable, and the little things weren't broken like in F8.

I have a laundry list of small items that are driving me nuts, but I don't have the time to submit them to MC. I just hope that their QA department has seen them and that they are just not a high priority for MC right now.

I am just sorry to see that the dependability of Flare has been compromised. It saddens me, but I still like Flare overall.

But the workarounds and "application has stopped working" do get old.

[stealth94rt]

OK, I'm somewhat relieved to hear that I'm not the only one feeling this way.

I also still love Flare, but I just wish they had spent more time in the testing/debugging phase before releasing it to the customers. It feels like we're doing that for them right now. I also hope that this is not a "new trend" for them, that they take note of all the bug reports and comments, and that they go back to releasing the software when it's ready (versus rushing it out to hit some fixed date).

[i-tietz]

After testing Flare 8 for 2 weeks, I switched back to Flare 7 and reported that to my department => The rest of the department waits for the bugfixes.