Notes for Flare Projects?

[ccardimon]

I was wondering if there was a "Notes" function for Flare.

Somewhere you could type in notes on project peculiarities, and so on, without having to send yourself yet another email.

Each of my Flare projects has so many project conditions attached to it, I thought it would be nice to keep such notes within the project itself, rather than have one more sheet of scribbled notes.

[Nita Beck]

My practice, minimally, is to include a topic file called "Authors_ReadMe.htm", which I condition out of all targets. In it, I give a summary of the purpose of the project, its structure, its targets, its conditions, and so forth. It's meant to guide any author who follows me (and sometimes that's *me* a year later!) in getting a quick understanding of the project.

For some projects, I have more formal project descriptions, usually written in Word (for a variety of reasons), and also usually kept right in the Flare project and conditioned out of all targets.

Finally, for one of my clients who is ISO9000 certified, we have formal project descriptions and project update work instructions that are handled as controlled documents. These documents are not kept within the Flare projects.

I am a firm believer in documenting one's Flare project.

[ccardimon]

Thanks, Nita! I knew if anyone had a solution, you would.

[SteveS]

As Nita suggests, I keep a topic at the top level of my project to document the project.

I also use things similar to remarks in programs throughout the project, I've even formatted it in green like a remark. These, too, are conditioned out.

Having an explanation why you did something twelve months ago is handy when you start to get short term memory problems like me...

[Nita Beck]

Steve makes a really good point about also seeding a project with comments at point of use. In any file that includes a Comment field, so that would be a stylesheet, condition tag set, file tag set, etc., I always include a comment about the purpose of a given style, condition, file tag, etc.

I also use a span style I called "Authornote", with a background color of yellow, that I use for notes within topics and snippets. These are conditioned out of production targets, but in my review targets, I tend to include the "authornotes", especially if I've used an authornote to convey some information to my reviewers.