Very large topic crashing Flare

[wendyw]

I am creating a user guide (print output for now) that has several appendix topics each of which will contain lengthy code segments. A single topic became 85 pages when I copied in the xml schema code using a <pre> tag class, and Flare shut down on me. This happened a few times. My question is: can Flare handle several really long topics like the appendix topics I am creating? I want to be able to index the code samples, so placing the code in a separate reference pdf file would omit the code from the index. I produced a similar user guide in FrameMaker, which could handle the large swaths of indexed code nicely, but I want to use the single-source authoring capabilities of Flare for this guide.(Additional info: I built from scratch in Flare rather than importing FrameMaker, so as to learn Flare.) Wondering if this could be a computer/available memory issue rather than a Flare issue?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions and guidance.

[sdcinvan]

A single topic became 85 pages when I copied in the xml schema code using a <pre> tag class, and Flare shut down on me.

I see no reason why Flare can't handle 85 pages for a single topic. However, I am wondering what you mean by copying xml schema code? Is this code for display, as text, in the appendix? Or are you entering this as code for Flare to interpret. If it is the later, yes, you may run into difficulty. Flare can become rather unstable when entering code it either doesn't understand or contains coding errors. However, if you enter this code as displayed text, you should not encounter any issues.

Wondering if this could be a computer/available memory issue rather than a Flare issue?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions and guidance.

I doubt it is a memory issue and I am betting it is how you entered the code (i.e. Flare is trying to parse it rather than simply display it as text).

[wendyw]

Thanks for the reply...the project I am working on is a developer's guide with copious amounts of indented schema and xml data samples, some very long. I got around the <pre> tag issue by using stylesheet classes to reproduce the indentation for the code.

This particular topic had over 2500 lines of code so I copied the tab-indented code into Word and used a macro to use search and replace to convert each tabbed line of indented code to an un-indented line with an initial label showing the appropriate number of tabs for the line [eg. first replace 9 consecutive tabs with "(9tab)", replace 8 consecutive tabs with "(8tab)"...down to (1tab)]. Next I copied the labeled code into a Madcap topic (via Notepad to rinse out any formatting) and applied indented p.class styles that approximate the indentation.
Anyway, the crashing stopped and I was able to make snippets out of some of the code sections for use elsewhere in the project.