MadCap Software Forums

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I'm planning to upgrade to Flare 10 from Flare 9, but before I do I wanted to ask those who have already upgraded how things are going.

I've heard from a few version 10 users that there are, as expected, the usual new release hiccups, some more consequential than others.

I've also searched this forum and found some number of issues specific to version 10 although many of those seem to have been last updated in mid-March. Is that because they've been fixed by a point release, I wonder?

My primary outputs are HTML5 and PDF. I typically don't test the boundaries of Flare's capabilities. I am interested in the new V10 Slide Show capability as well as some of the other new usability features.

With that in mind, is it safe to go into the version 10 water? Or should I wait for the next updated version of 10 before jumping in?

Cheers & thanks for your help,
Riley
SFO

It is still pretty soon to judge I think. We always upgrade to the newest version be leave the prior version installed, since you can have different versions installed.

I would like to know what release hiccups you have discovered or heard of. Do you have a link to the discussions? Thanks!

hillaryfay wrote:I would like to know what release hiccups you have discovered or heard of. Do you have a link to the discussions?

Since this Forum's search tool is finicky, I used an external search engine and site:http://forums.madcapsoftware.com to search for Flare 10 in combination with other modifiers.

Other information has come via email from others who have upgraded. Some of the issues are annoyances. A few issues are substantial enough that the associated support issues have been open for a while.

That's one of the reasons I've asked Flare 10 users to let us know how it's goin'. I'm trying to discover any show stoppers before upgrading.

For what it's worth, I prefer not to run two versions of any product. If a product's newest version modifies projects so that they become incompatible with the preceding version, and Flare 10 evidently does do that for at least some features (Indexes? I can't recall which ones exactly), then I find myself managing the dual installations rather than doing useful work. (I also like to completely delete Flare's registry detritus before upgrading. If nothing else, doing that gets rid of the text-search terms and file names I used six months ago that Flare has permanently stored in my Windows registry…)

Cheers & thanks,
Riley
SFO

I have been using version 10 and I'm getting several "this application has encountered a problem" message and asks to send a report back to MadCap. For example, I was using Ctrl + Z today and the application asked me that and then closed.

I don't go mad with all of Flare's features so not having any trouble here. I think the biggest grouse I've read on here is the speed (or lack of) when using with SVN. Because we do our SVN stuff outside of Flare that's not a problem for us, but if you use SVN with Flare several people have found that to be a show-stopper so they've uninstalled Flare 10 until it's fixed.

Choccie beat me to it. I was going to say that the only pain-point I've encountered thus far with v10 is the slowness of working with SVN. Other than that, I've been feeling like a kid with a new toy.

I'm happy.

We needed responsive online help and now we've got it.

We also had an enormous project (imported from Frame) that Flare's never really been able to handle. Using the export feature, we were able to divide it into two smaller projects that Flare plays with nicely. We had been putting off the split for a long time because we couldn't devise a clean process for getting it done.

My one complaint: SVN performance is abysmal. This happened in a previous release---I can't remember which one---and Madcap fixed it the next dot release.

I hope Madcap is taking this seriously. We upgraded our working copies when we upgraded to Flare 10, so I would imagine rolling back to Flare 9 isn't automagic.

I upgraded to Flare 10 and so can contribute some information to my own question.

I've encountered a few issues with Flare 10 PDF Targets:

• Flare 10 PDFs appear to be constructed differently than were Flare 09 PDFs. The result is that some user agents struggle to efficiently present the PDFs. Firefox 28's PDF view in particular takes "forever" to display the version 10 PDF that it displayed without trouble when it was a version 09 PDF.
• Acrobat Reader 11 and my old Acrobat 9.5 are intermittently crashing when I either open a Flare 10 PDF or when I scroll rapidly through them. Non-Adobe user agents don't exhibit this behavior.
• Flare 10 inconsistently applies Page Layout formatting, specifically some right-aligned heading text, to some pages. As part of troubleshooting I gen'ed the Project as a Word Target and in the Word document the FIRST pages were correctly right-aligned.

Anyhow, I have a couple of Bug Reports in and will report back on the resolutions, if any.

Cheers & hope this helps,
Riley
SFO