Flare 10 wishlists and sneak peeks?

[Scotty]

It's about that time of year again, assuming Madcap are keeping with the late Feb/early March release schedule.

Any info on what's going to be new in Flare 10? What are you all hoping for?

[ChoccieMuffin]

Hoping for a "quick styles" box. At the moment every time I want to apply a style, I have to scroll down one or two times to get to the style I want, because the default styles (like abbr, b, big, cite, code etc) fill up the pane and my custom span.UI is down further. Even worse when I want to add a p.tip, have to scroll almost to the bottom.

I just wish I could put the styles I use frequently in a separate area (like when you use a font in Word, that font appears at the top of the list).

Would also be very cool to be able to use keyboard shortcuts a bit more (assigning keyboard shortcuts to styles, as you can in FrameMaker?) but I doubt that will happen. I'm not a happy mouse-clicker, so anything that means I don't need to use it as much would be good for me.

[Nita Beck]

Any info on what's going to be new in Flare 10?

Anyone who knows anything is sworn to secrecy 'cause they will have signed a nondisclosure agreement. But that doesn't limit anyone from wishing!

[Scotty]

Any info on what's going to be new in Flare 10?

Anyone who knows anything is sworn to secrecy 'cause they will have signed a nondisclosure agreement. But that doesn't limit anyone from wishing!

Bah, we're almost there. Surely some buzz-building sneak peeks from MadCap are in order?

[RamonS]

Bah, we're almost there. Surely some buzz-building sneak peeks from MadCap are in order?

You need to ask MadCap for that directly...maybe they tell you more than that the next version will be 10.

[NorthEast]

Bah, we're almost there. Surely some buzz-building sneak peeks from MadCap are in order? :P

You need to ask MadCap for that directly...maybe they tell you more than that the next version will be 10.

I have information* that they're moving to an Apple-style naming convention; so it'll be Flare Budgerigar or Duck-Billed Platypus.

* lies

[RamonS]

So, not iFlare as it was rumored in the blogosphere?

[rob hollinger]

Hoping for a "quick styles" box. At the moment every time I want to apply a style, I have to scroll down one or two times to get to the style I want, because the default styles (like abbr, b, big, cite, code etc) fill up the pane and my custom span.UI is down further. Even worse when I want to add a p.tip, have to scroll almost to the bottom.

I just wish I could put the styles I use frequently in a separate area (like when you use a font in Word, that font appears at the top of the list).

Would also be very cool to be able to use keyboard shortcuts a bit more (assigning keyboard shortcuts to styles, as you can in FrameMaker?) but I doubt that will happen. I'm not a happy mouse-clicker, so anything that means I don't need to use it as much would be good for me.

CTRL + SHIFT + H > Type the name of the style you want to apply

[rob hollinger]

Sneak Peek into MadCap 2014

http://youtu.be/Kct0KDvSrAs

[Scotty]

Hoping for a "quick styles" box. At the moment every time I want to apply a style, I have to scroll down one or two times to get to the style I want, because the default styles (like abbr, b, big, cite, code etc) fill up the pane and my custom span.UI is down further. Even worse when I want to add a p.tip, have to scroll almost to the bottom.

I just wish I could put the styles I use frequently in a separate area (like when you use a font in Word, that font appears at the top of the list).

Would also be very cool to be able to use keyboard shortcuts a bit more (assigning keyboard shortcuts to styles, as you can in FrameMaker?) but I doubt that will happen. I'm not a happy mouse-clicker, so anything that means I don't need to use it as much would be good for me.

CTRL + SHIFT + H > Type the name of the style you want to apply

Thanks for this... but can't get that to work reliably in 7.2.1 for some reason.

Agree with the OP, some way to organise the list of styles is a big miss. Assigning keyboard shortcuts would also be great.

[Msquared]

I second that. It was almost the first feature request I raised when I started with Flare. I've got keyboard shortcuts for all my regular Word styles, so I'd really, really, really love to be able to set up the same ones for Flare, instead of having to scroll down interminable lists of styles to set what I want.

I tried Ctrl + Shift + H. But then you just get to specify one letter, and then a drop-down box containing all your relevant styles, with the first style that starts with your selected letter at the bottom of the list. Seriously?

So, depending on how big I make the box, I can display around 20 styles, of which 19 are styles I definitely don't want as they don't begin with the correct letter, so I still have to scroll. .

And I only have around 80 <p> styles to scroll through. I use around 40 regularly, all of which I can set immediately with Alt + two letters in Word.

I love lots of things about Flare, but that's not one of them.

[ecjoe]

IMO, the one feature that would most improve productivity/efficiency is custom shortcuts. The ability to define a shortcut key for any action that can be performed within Flare, including applying a particular style, would dramatically improve usability.

Joe

[Msquared]

Oh, and it would be wonderful to have an option to get tracked changes and comments out into PDF and other outputs for review.

[Paul Griffiths]

Ctrl+Y

Please.

[akobayashi]

Hi, will it be possible to create a plain, single page html?

We're trying to convert odt file content (heavily formatted) - via word - to plain html.

thanks

akagi

[RamonS]

You can use LibreOffice to convert the ODT file to HTML. Flare does not know the only real open document format out there. The resulting HTML could then be imported into Flare, but there is no way to know how well this will work out. It should be easy enough to test.

[ajturnersurrey]

Just three wishes from me:

1. Better control of text flow into body regions on a page layout - so that you could force certain text into certain body areas - would make producing exciting datasheets easy .... and avoid calls for InDesign! (I've been hoping for this since I started with v6!)

2. The ability to design an "end" page layout which will automatically be applied to the last page of a pdf

3. A big enhancement to webhelp mobile skins - I've only recently trialled this for the first time and it feels like a half-baked piece of functionality in v9

Oh and I'm with Msquared on

option to get tracked changes and comments out into PDF and other outputs for review

. Contributor is OK, but the barrier to getting SMTs to contribute is much much smaller if they get to stick with pdfs.

Right now I feel that MadCap might act on no. 3 (as it is new and exciting stuff)... I feel more pessimistic about my chances of getting 1 and 2!

[RamonS]

Two things
a) did you all submit feature requests for your wishes?
b) don't expect your wishes to be all included in the next version, especially if you answered a) with "No"