Drawing Call Outs in Flare - Possible?

[ccardimon]

Is there a way to draw in Call Outs, in a quick and dirty way?

I have Call Outs in the Word file I imported, but I can't superimpose the images on top of anything.

I have converted them manually into PNGs and JPGs. They came in, badly, as GIFs.

Does Flare allow users to draw, or must I tell the SME that his nicely done Calls Outs are out of the question?

[Nita Beck]

Flare itself doesn't have the capability of adding/editing callouts to images.

The MadCap folks have put callout functionality in MadCap Capture. You can open the image in Capture (or even take the screencapture with Capture, if you're talking about a screen image) and add all the callouts you like. You then insert the image into Flare; whenever you need to edit the callouts, you right-click the image in Flare and select Edit in MadCap Capture (I think; I'm going on memory at the moment). Capture is launched, you make changes there, save, and the image is updated in Flare.

Hope this helps (though I suspect it's not the answer you were hoping for).

Nita

[KevinDAmery]

Flare itself doesn't have the capability of adding/editing callouts to images.

The MadCap folks have put callout functionality in MadCap Capture. You can open the image in Capture (or even take the screencapture with Capture, if you're talking about a screen image) and add all the callouts you like. You then insert the image into Flare; whenever you need to edit the callouts, you right-click the image in Flare and select Edit in MadCap Capture (I think; I'm going on memory at the moment). Capture is launched, you make changes there, save, and the image is updated in Flare.

Hope this helps (though I suspect it's not the answer you were hoping for).

Nita

Just to add to Nita's points, Capture can link to your Flare project, which makes the Flare variables available in the Capture workspace. This helps if you need to use terms in a callout that you've included as variables: if you change the variable text in Flare, the next time you make a build the change is automatically applied to you callout the same as it is for topic text, with no actions required on your part.