Reducing the File size of a Flare Project

[Kavya]

Hi,

I am experiencing extreme slowness due to the huge file size of the Flare project that I am working on. Could you please suggest a solution to reduce the file size, thereby increasing the speed.

Thanks in advance

[RamonS]

Hi and welcome to the forums!

Which file(s) do you mean and why do you think large file(s) are the reason for slowness? Do you have the project files on a network share by any chance? That will slow things down drastically across the board.

[Kavya]

Hello,

Thanks a lot for your response. I work on a remote desktop which adds to the slowness. Could you suggest a solution to overcome this problem?
The file size of my flare project is 10.6 MB when zipped and 398 MB when unzipped.

Thanks,
Kavya

[RamonS]

Copy the files locally and work on your local PC. The Flare license allows for installing Flare on multiple systems as long as only one is in use at a time. When you enable drive sharing in Remote Desktop you can easily copy the files from the remote system to your local PC.

[LTinker68]

The Flare license allows for installing Flare on multiple systems as long as only one is in use at a time.

I thought it was just two, not multiple. So a work computer and a home computer, or a work computer and a work laptop, etc.

[RamonS]

You may be right, but since Flare phones home upon start it should be fine either way. When in doubt ask MadCap sales or support.

[coleymarie80]

Hi, I am trying to reduce the size of my .chm file but the above wasn't helpful to me. Hoping someone has some other ideas.

It would help if I was able to get rid of duplicate images...my Help is set up so that I have several targets, and my images are tagged with conditional text. However, many are used in more than one target, so they are being generated for each target. Is there a way that I can put the images in one folder and have each target point to the same location?

Thanks!

[LTinker68]

See this feature in the help --> http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... argets.htm. Alternatively, you can do it manually by applying conditions to the image files or the folders they reside in, just as you apply conditions to topics or content in topics.

[rob hollinger]

You should not be getting duplicate images in the output.
If you have 5 topics pointing to the same image, then that image will only be in the CHM file 1 time and each of the topics will reference that single image.
If you have duplicate images in the project and the topics are pointing to the different images, then they will be copied to the CHM file.

If you are getting unwanted images in the output, you can either condition from the build or in the Target, click on the Advanced tab and check the option "Exclude content not linked directly or indirectly from the target". This will not use any files that do not have explicit links to them.

[techwriter31]

Not sure if this helps, as it might not be a typical use case, but...we often create our source images in Illustrator. Initially, when first starting to use Flare, we created a "Source_Images" directory for each project within the Flare \Content directory. We would output the images as PNG files and stored the PNGs in the default \Content\Images directory. We then linked to the PNGs from our topics.

When doing this, we found that that in the generated CHM outputs, the stored Illustrator files contributed to the overall size of the CHM, even though we were only including links to the PNG files. So, we moved the Source_Images directory to the root of the project and the CHM file size went back down to normal.