Is there a way to generate a text file using Flare?

[HeraTech]

I know that "plain text" is not an output format for Flare. But one of my deliverables is release notes as a text file. Is there some way to automatically generate a text file out of Flare that doesn't require generating a PDF or Word doc and then saving that file as .txt?

[Nita Beck]

I saw your post earlier today and pondered it for a bit. As you say, Flare does not have a plain text output type so, no, there does not appear to be a straightforward way to generate your release notes as .txt directly out of Flare. At least I can't think of one...

[Msquared]

I'm going to turn this on its head.

Why do you need to create release notes as a text file? Is it because they need to be able to be read on systems where there is no access to Acrobat Reader? Or is it because you have always created release notes as text, because once upon a time, the production and printing cycle was so long that late-breaking information had to be provided in the only suitable format as an afterthought?

If the former, then, like Nita, I've racked my brains and can't think of a way. However, if the former, this is your chance to show how versatile Flare is, and how quickly you can generate good quality PDFs from late-breaking content.

[RamonS]

If the need is to generate a text file for release notes then my suggestion would be to copy and paste text from the Flare project into Notepad and save the text file. That way you can still maintain and include the notes in Flare and the project. The amount of work is likely to be the same this way than any other way. Sure, would be nice to automate this but I assume that the need for release notes comes up only a few times per year. It is most likely not a daily or weekly task.
That said, I startpaged for a solution and found this: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/htmlastext.html
That tool takes an HTML file, strips the tags and scripts from the file, then saves it as text file. You can run this without UI from the command line and that way you could craft a batch file that runs on a schedule. As long as the location of the source does not change you can generate the text file as often as you want without having to do a thing. I did not try this tool myself (yet), not sure how well this works but it might be worth a try.

[LTinker68]

Well, the good news is I figured out how to get Flare to output to a .txt file. The bad news is, it's not something you'd want to use.

So the good news, for those who are curious, you can get a .txt output type by opening the target, going to the Advanced tab, and enabling the option to "Use custom file extension for topics", then typing txt (without the period) in the field to the right. That will build the output with the extension .txt.

The problem is that it basically converts the entire XHTML topic as code, so your .txt file would contain the same text you see when you open a topic in the Internal Text Editor. That is, you see all the HTML tags, classes, etc.

Now I only played with a couple of target types and didn't do much with the skin or masterpage, so it could be that you could get close to the desired output. If you do, make sure you post back with everything you did for others who might want to try the same thing.

[sdcinvan]

Since all my documents are automatically published on a MadBuild server, I need an automated plain text output for certain documents, such as our EULA and release notes. Two documents that I need to produce before I leave.

It's Friday, I am going on holidays, I am supposed to be happy before I leave the office.

This is a serious disappointment? I am simply shocked that such a reasonable target output is not available.

I'll keep looking for a Targeted solution. If I do not reply back, I never found one and I was forced to temporarily and manually create a text version of each document.

[atomdocs]

Although you exlcuded the option, I think using a Word target and then saving as plain text is the nearest you can get at the moment. I also think Flare should have a text target option, but in the meantime, going through Word is not a lot of extra work.

[sdcinvan]

Although you exlcuded the option, I think using a Word target and then saving as plain text is the nearest you can get at the moment. I also think Flare should have a text target option, but in the meantime,

Actually, of all the tools I have available to me (including NotePad++), it actually took Word 2013 with its ASCII (MS-DOS encoding) export to get me close to what I required. But it was still an annoying +20 minute task that Flare should have been able to handle, automatically.

going through Word is not a lot of extra work.

Ha, I wish!
Word got me close but it wasn't perfect because it oddly left behind a two non-ASCII characters and it was unable to handle simple French characters to plain ASCII substitution. So, I needed to carefully change the accented characters to English letter 'equivalents'.

As I mentioned earlier, I need to automate this process in the future. I figure this is a weekend project for me to build an automated parsing tool.

Thanks for your reply Tom.

Have a nice weekend!

[Greenland]

If you add a text file to your /Content Folder in Flare, this text file will be copied in the ouptut folder when using HTML targets, and therefore will be available in the publish folder. You could therefore have the already formatted and ready-to-edit file in your project, and have that file automatically published to your server when building the project.

However the output will generate other (probabably unwanted) files in the publishing folder (I mean the web site layout), but these could be cleaned automatically later. I'm not sure that this solution is applicable in your environment, but I hope this can help.

Michael

[sdcinvan]

I sent off a feature request this morning. Flare really needs a text output option.

Here is my feature request:
"Flare requires a configurable ASCII output format. I recently discovered this shortcoming when I was asked to produce a pure-ASCII copy of our Terms and Conditions (as well as a few other related documents). The pure ASCII copy is required for our in-software terms screen (this is common practice - the compiler won't accept any non-ASCII characters or formatting codes).

To my great disappointment, there was no practical way to manually generate an ASCII version of this document. More importantly, there was no automated way to do this via our MadBuild server!

To create a pure ASCII copy, I had to output the Flare documents to Microsoft Word and then use Word's SAVE AS MS-DOS TEXT. Even then, I still needed to correct French accented characters before the text was acceptable by our software team.

It is rather disappointing that Flare does not support a TEXT output target. Please consider this for a near-as-possible future release. In the meantime, I must go through these manual steps anytime I update these documents."

[HeraTech]

I posted this question and then got distracted by another project (like you do). And then today I just saw that one of our Integration products wants a text file, because the environment that we're integrating with will allow plug-in extension packages to include documentation, as long as the documentation is a text file. I went to search the forums, and lo and behold, y'all have been working on my question for me.

I'm off to experiment with Flare and see how ugly the text output looks.

And I'll also be filing an enhancement request for a text output. Because while I can probably find a way to kill the text Release Notes, I suspect that our Integrations team is going to continue to ask me for text files for their projects.

Thanks everyone for all your input!

[HeraTech]

OK, I've played around with this a bit.

LTinker68, you're right, the save as .txt option is pretty ugly. Too ugly to the useful. (And now that I'm thinking about it, I think I might have tried that before I had posted to the forum.)

RamonS - a big thank you for finding a solution that hadn't even occurred to me. The HTML to Text converter you linked to works pretty nicely, all things considered. During my first test it also converting my breadcrumbs and footers, but that was solved by creating a different Master Page without those elements. Lists come through numbered like they should, and you can configure what symbols you want to use for your bulleted lists.

I haven't figured out how to get a single text file yet (The Release Notes that I'm playing around with convert as separate topics). But for the Integration plug-in project that I'm going to be working on, it will be simple enough to just write that content as a single file, then convert it to text.

Thanks again everyone!

[RamonS]

I haven't figured out how to get a single text file yet

Startpaged for that and the solution is rather straight forward:

Code: Select all

type file1.txt file2.txt > out.txt

If you always have the same names of files you can either write a batch file or just keep that command handy in a text file and then paste into the command line window. There is definitely a way to do this with PowerShell as well, but this is so bare bones that writing a script doesn't seem necessary.

[sdcinvan]

I haven't figured out how to get a single text file yet

Startpaged for that and the solution is rather straight forward:

Code: Select all

type file1.txt file2.txt > out.txt

If you always have the same names of files you can either write a batch file or just keep that command handy in a text file and then paste into the command line window. There is definitely a way to do this with PowerShell as well, but this is so bare bones that writing a script doesn't seem necessary.

type file1.txt file2.txt > out.txt

Going old school!

[RamonS]

type file1.txt file2.txt > out.txt

Going old school!

Yea, it is a throwback to the DOS era, but it works and delivers results much faster than waiting for MadCap to put text output into Flare. While I understand the reasons I still see little need because copy & paste plus the above command do the trick right now within a few minutes if it even takes that long. Plus, with HTML output in place and file names kept the same this can be fully automated.

Besides that, it is also rather easy to add an RTF field into applications, both desktop and web flavors. The requirement that the source text is US-only flat ASCII is something from Jurassic Park.

[sdcinvan]

type file1.txt file2.txt > out.txt

Going old school!

... The requirement that the source text is US-only flat ASCII is something from Jurassic Park.

Nope, not quite (even thought it is tempting to agree with you).

The Python (a current and common software development language) requires 100% pure-plain ASCII text for its help compiler. That is how I got involved in this thread. Flare can't do it alone.