Flare 12: PDF output unusable!

[JupiterJones]

Hello,

yesterday I installed Flare 12 and generated outputs of some of my Flare 11 projects. The online targets were mostly ok, but the PDFs are catastrophic!

• Some pages are empty, content missing
• TOC is defective, produces "graphics errors" in Acrobat
• Borders of divs and tables look horrible, different line widths etc.
• Right page margins are partly ignored, contents running off the page

No feedback from MadCap Support so far...
Anyone else having such problems?

Regards,
JJ

[RamonS]

I created PDF output for my project using F12 yesterday and it all came out exactly as it did with F11. To be fair, my PDF output is not that involved. I do not use left/right page layouts (header and footer are centered and thus the same on each page). I use a ToC proxy for table of contents. My only complaint is that the Flare PDFs are ridiculously huge so that I have to drag the output through a compressor each time that cuts it from 30MB down to 5MB with no visible difference.

[cruitbuck]

I put this comment on the wrong page and put this as a placemarker until I could figure out how to delete it. That's all.

[RamonS]

????? What was/is the problem?

[PAtools]

Fortunately I did not have such severe problems, but the same style for figure captions is extremely different in Flare 11 and 12: I wanted the caption to be a little bit closer to the figure in Flare 11 and it seems that the sizes were interpreted not correctly - so I had to declare a larger offset to fit my specs.
Now in Flare 12 the figure caption is located inside the image - not really what I want.
The problem is that either the whole team must upgrade at the same time - or nobody. An evaluation side by side seems not possible.

[ChrisBradley]

After my upgrade, Flare 12 was applying the font color in my page layout footer frame to the background color (the header frame was not affected). I found no way to correct the problem using the GUI, so I had to edit the page layout in plain text to apply the style correctly.

My other issue with PDF is PDF preview. I keep getting an error stating that Adobe Acrobat does not support IE's Enhanced Protected Mode (EPM). It tells me to install the latest version of Adobe Reader or disable EPM in IE. I already have the latest version of Reader, and I verified that EPM is disabled in IE. IE is not even the default web browser for my PC or Flare, Chrome is. So I'm not sure what is going on.

[doc_guy]

The problem is that either the whole team must upgrade at the same time - or nobody. An evaluation side by side seems not possible.

This is pretty typical. If you want somebody to use Flare 12 to verify, copy your project to a new location, rename the project so you know you're working in your Flare 12 demo version, and then test away with Flare 12. If you are working in a source control tool, you can create a branch of your code so you can test Flare 12 but not affect your main code.

I always tell my clients that if one person is upgrading, everybody needs to upgrade, and this is true for all help authoring tools with multiple authors working in the same project.

[doc_guy]

For what it is worth, our Flare 12 PDFs (10 PDF documents totaling about 2,000 pages) worked flawlessly, which makes me wonder what is different between your project and mine that are causing such dramatic differences in the output.

[ChrisBradley]

Madcap support determined that my PDF preview issue was a problem with Adobe Reader. I had to uninstall and re-install reader to get it to work correctly. So after fixing my footer frame my PDF output is fine now.

[jlwood66]

Madcap support determined that my PDF preview issue was a problem with Adobe Reader. I had to uninstall and re-install reader to get it to work correctly. So after fixing my footer frame my PDF output is fine now.

I've verified that EPM is disabled and uninstalled and reinstalled Adobe Reader; am still having this problem! Can anyone help?

-Julie

[ChrisBradley]

Here is the reponse from Madcap. I had to download the viewer from https://get.adobe.com/reader/

Thank you for contacting MadCap Technical Support.

Although the latest Adobe Reader is installed on the machine, can I have you please uninstall and reinstall the application? Adobe recently added a change to their Reader installation that now is needed in order for Flare v12's PDF preview to work.

Adobe Reader will indicate it is the latest version currently on the machine, which the download is as well, but the reinstall will include the proper fix. Below is a helpful explanation on the latest enhancement made for Adobe Reader.

https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/epm- ... ducts.html

Please let me know if you have any other questions regarding this issue.

[jlwood66]

I solved the problem, at least partially. I had both Acrobat Pro and Acrobat Reader installed. I removed Reader and the preview works again, although a bit differently as it now appears in the Acrobat Pro interface.

[JupiterJones]

Update:

The reason for my initially described PDF issues were related to the page layouts. Flare obviously has a bug when handling parameter values which include a decimal separator and when using different regional settings. In my case (German system), there was a mixture of "comma" and "point" values (either introduced by Flare 11 or Flare 12, I did not edit the source code manually). For example margin values like "3,5cm" were interpreted as "35cm"! This moved the whole content out of the visible area of the page, on other pages it lead to 35 cm wide content frames etc. The strange errors in div and table borders, line widhts etc. were also caused by these distortions.

After manually removing all commas from the page layout files, the PDFs looked just fine!

The PDF preview does not work on my system either. I will try to uninstall the Acrobat Reader.

JJ

[RobinS]

My front cover has white text in a transparent body frame on top of a solid colour graphic.
Since installing the patch yesterday the body frame in PDF output has acquired a white background, so cover has a big solid white rectangle and is unusable.
Have raised bug with support ....and reverted to Flare 11. (As I'm a sole author, it's an easy solution.)

Also having frequent crash reports (but continue to work OK after dismissing them, no damage done, apparently).
Both the above are new behaviour since installing this week's patch - original v12 seemed OK.

[dwilliams619]

My front cover has white text in a transparent body frame on top of a solid colour graphic.
Since installing the patch yesterday the body frame in PDF output has acquired a white background, so cover has a big solid white rectangle and is unusable.
Have raised bug with support ....and reverted to Flare 11. (As I'm a sole author, it's an easy solution.)

Also having frequent crash reports (but continue to work OK after dismissing them, no damage done, apparently).
Both the above are new behaviour since installing this week's patch - original v12 seemed OK.

We've got the exact same issue with the white rectangles instead of transparent frames in the PDF output. I've also raised a bug. I hope it gets fixed, as there are some cool things in V12 that I'm keen to use but the PDF output is unusable as is for us.

[cruitbuck]

IMHO, it is best to restart Flare 12 and 11 after every exception it throws. The occurrence, for me, is usually persistent. Also, it is import to send each bug report to MC as it occurs. If it continues have MC support review the exception reports.

BobB

My front cover has white text in a transparent body frame on top of a solid colour graphic.
Since installing the patch yesterday the body frame in PDF output has acquired a white background, so cover has a big solid white rectangle and is unusable.
Have raised bug with support ....and reverted to Flare 11. (As I'm a sole author, it's an easy solution.)

Also having frequent crash reports (but continue to work OK after dismissing them, no damage done, apparently).
Both the above are new behaviour since installing this week's patch - original v12 seemed OK.

[ChoccieMuffin]

My front cover has white text in a transparent body frame on top of a solid colour graphic.
Since installing the patch yesterday the body frame in PDF output has acquired a white background, so cover has a big solid white rectangle and is unusable.
Have raised bug with support ....and reverted to Flare 11. (As I'm a sole author, it's an easy solution.)

Also having frequent crash reports (but continue to work OK after dismissing them, no damage done, apparently).
Both the above are new behaviour since installing this week's patch - original v12 seemed OK.

I had a similar problem (a header on my page layouts sat on top of a grey box, the background of the header was white rather than transparent). This is the reply. In brief, it was a bug that has now been fixed.

" I have looked into the issue and it seems that it does occur but it is due to the Solid setting in the Color section of the Background tab. If this is set to "default" and then transparent is selected, it will work in Flare 12. I have included a screenshot.
This may have been a bug previously that was fixed which would explain why it appeared correct in Flare 11."

So I went through all my page layouts and removed "BackgroundType=Solid" (or something like that - can't remember, as I've already made the change.)

Hope that helps.

[LeeD]

Does this problem only apply to the Preview of PDF by the Flare 12 author, and not the distributed, standalone PDF? That is, can users view the PDF in any environment and with any Adobe Reader version?

Leon

BTW, MadWorld was great!

[law]

I'm new to Flare but am having the same problem with corrupted PDF output in Flare 12. One minute it works and the next my fonts are all corrupted and there's a strange line down the side of my document.
I tried deleting the TOC and rebuilding, topic by topic, to see if it was a particular file. This worked yesterday, but I can't seem to isolate the issue. I have reinstalled Flare (12) and am reinstalling Adobe so am hoping that will help. I'm also waiting to hear what support says.

[CindyBrockAtlanta]

I was able to get my PDF Preview issue partially resolved by uninstalling Acrobat Reader (from my Acrobat Pro). It does open the topic in the full version of Acrobat Pro and there aren't any issues with how it looks. However, when I return to Flare, in the preview window, it shows the attached error message.

Ideas?

~Cindy ;}

pdf-preview-error.png

[Wendy_Pod]

Hey Cindy - getting the same weird behavior - preview in Pro, ie-looking error in Flare.

Did you find a resolution?