Using Flare to produce a printed manual

[Steve Drake]

Hi,

At my work, we use Flare v6.10 to create webhelp for our product. However, we also have Installation and Migration Guides that are distributed either as PDFs or actually printed out and put in a 3-ring binder. We use Framemaker 7.2 to produce our printed manuals. There is little to no overlap between the online help and the other guides, so we don't need to single-source. But, here is my question for all of you...

Frame 7.2 is getting a little long in the tooth. We are trying to decide between upgrading to the newest version of Frame or dumping it altogether and producing our print-only manuals in Flare. Do any of you use Flare to produce printed-only manuals? How does it work? Can you control the PDF output when you are using the Mypdf target instead of framemaker/acrobat pdfs? Bottom-line, can Flare completely replace Framemaker as a tool to produce multi-chapter, printed manuals?

I'm eager to hear your opinons.

Thanks,

Steve

[lacastle]

Yes. I think most people who use Flare have some sort of Print output.

There is a good amount of MadCap documentation about switching from FrameMaker - http://www.madcapsoftware.com/assets/Fr ... actice.pdf - and webinars and getting-started guides.

I'm currently in the process of importing over 300 FM manuals into Flare so i can format them easier (i haven't worked with FM in a long time) and have everything in one place.

[Nita Beck]

Short answer: Yes!

I use Flare (almost) exclusively for all the documentation I produce for my clients, whether that documentation is a traditional user manual (headers, footers, title page, cross-references to specific pages, numbered table and figure titles, and so forth) that will be printed on honest-to-goodness professional presses, a printed "quick start guide" (also professionally printed), PDFs of print docs that are installed with applications or available via a web site, .CHM Help, or WebHelp.

For one particular product that I document, I produce a 150-page 7.25 inch by 9 inch printed manual, a DVD-case sized printed quick start, a number of 8.5 inch by 11 inch PDFs intended for users to read online or to print, and a Help system. Much of the content is shared, but some of the content is unique to each document. Yet I happily maintain all the content in the same Flare project.

In my experience (and I think others' as well), setting up a Flare project to produce targets of a variety of different formats takes time -- sometimes a lot of it. For the project I describe above, my client, a large corporation, has very rigid specs for branding, typography, and the like. It took me quite a while to create the stylesheets for these different formats, especially to set up the xref formats that would render the cross-references appropriately in each. I also had to adapt my writing style conventions somewhat so that what I wrote worked equally well in any generated target. And, and, and.... many more issues gradually worked out.

My advice is that you start with a small pilot project to work out all your print publishing issues. And, be aware that if you need to use a corporate font, you might or might not be able to use it for Flare-produced printed documents. That's a very big "gotcha" that you need to learn about sooner rather than later, before you've sunk time. Check out these posts (and there might be other pertinent ones too):
-- http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... &sk=t&sd=a
-- http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... t=opentype

[Steve Drake]

Thanks for the tips. I appreciate your taking the time to share them with me. I think we will be moving to Flare to produce our printed materials.

Thanks,

Steve

[gmel999]

I use a PDF output as the only user documentation format for the main software product I support, and it has worked fine so far. It's a simple layout, which essentially lists all the project topics without page breaks between them. The TOC (organized very much like the pre-Flare Word user guides for this product) provides a logical order for the chapters and topics. There are Basic User, Advanced User, and Administrator guide PDFs, and they are included in the software installation.

The biggest challenge has been some of the screencaps -- when a particular window or dialog box is very wide and has to be reduced a lot to fit the page, the quality can be affected a lot. We're trying to use more cropped sections of screens in these cases, and that works well.