What's the single biggest Flare project you've had to manage

forfear · Post by **forfear** » Sat Mar 29, 2008 11:05 pm

The projects i am working are modular and so far are broken down into sizes of about no more than 200 topics.

The larger your projects, the more important a good and efficient workflow in Flare is to you and your team. Once you start hitting more than a thousand, you're going to really need to know Flare really well.

However i understand this is common territory for the old SGML, xml software like Framemaker.

Have a listen to this

Flare does mega documentation projects for more than a thousand topics.

Check it out at
http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2008/0 ... er-career/

An interesting case study
http://www.slideshare.net/tputkey/super ... down-silos

Post by **RamonS** » Sun Mar 30, 2008 5:27 pm

The biggest one that I ever put together from imported RoboHelp projects was around 8000 topics.

forfear · Post by **forfear** » Sun Mar 30, 2008 5:39 pm

is that even conceivable? ! 8000 wow! you must have a quick hand.

Post by **RamonS** » Sun Mar 30, 2008 7:21 pm

It is a massive piece, but so is the application that it is for. But that includes topics that result into a "custom" glossary, so there were hundreds of topics that consisted of one sentence. Also, most of the topics were written once and then never will be touched again as those portions of the application never change. Only about 50 topics had screen shots and most topics were quite short. The reason for making such a mega project was for having search capabilities across the whole help system, which wasn't possible before.

Also, congratulations forfear for the 100th post.

Post by **Andrew** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 8:45 am

Our main Flare project is about 6000 topics. The hardest thing about managing that many topics in Flare is that it's difficult to change things on a broad scale. And since this is a conversion from RH, it's got inline-styled tables everywhere...ugh. We're trying to slowly replace them with Table Styles, but the kick in the nuts is that, when you apply a Table Style in Flare, it doesn't remove the inline styles, so the results get ugly. Then I have to go into the code and remove all those inline styles.

The other big problems I've run into with that many topics is 1) finding the topic you want, 2) lots of lag in the UI when clicking and scrolling in the Content Explorer, 3) Flare UI for adding hyperlinks sucks for large projects, 4) build times are very long.

However, I believe trentthetheif has a project with something like 18,000 topics. I think it might be merged...and I know he runs a lot of automation along with it.

forfear · Post by **forfear** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 5:55 pm

interesting...but i think its all legit requirements to be expected of the software. To find the topic you want in a 18000 project.
As Flare's projects grows from strength to strength, the user interface will have to provide functionality to support the additional load put on it. Good topic category management will be important and folder topic naming i guess.

Wow! that's the biggest i've heard, 18,000 (with three zeroes) whoah!
It must take a whole night to build.
Looks like you won't be able to preview help system changes as often

PS. To remove inline styles in the Table quickly, on the Text Formatting toolbar, clickthe Unformat command.

Post by **Andrew** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 9:26 am

forfear wrote:PS. To remove inline styles in the Table quickly, on the Text Formatting toolbar, clickthe Unformat command.

I think I love you. I didn't even realize that button was there, and it appears to perfectly solve my problem. Thanks forfear!

forfear · Post by **forfear** » Thu Apr 03, 2008 8:17 am

I was very glad when i discovered it almost by accident as well recently.

This will save you lots of keystrokes for sure...or thinking about regular expressions and all that.

gewriter_2 · Post by **gewriter_2** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 12:21 pm

Our largest project thus far is 946 topics. But we're looking into merging several projects together to make one larger project. It's nice to hear that Flare supports this easily, as that was a concern of ours. However, has anyone else had trouble with right-clicking in a topic and getting the app hung up on the Quick Cross-reference option? Even when I don't intened to hover over it, if the application gets a bit slow, it sometimes sticks in that place, then hangs up the application. I usually have to close down Flare and restart when that happens. My collegues have run into that issue as well.

Post by **LTinker68** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 2:53 pm

I don't usually select that option from that menu, but I seem to recall hearing it mentioned before, although I thought it had been fixed. What version of Flare are you running?

gewriter_2 · Post by **gewriter_2** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 2:56 pm

LTinker68 wrote:I don't usually select that option from that menu, but I seem to recall hearing it mentioned before, although I thought it had been fixed. What version of Flare are you running?

Oh, I don't usually select that option on purpose, but sometimes it still happens.

I'm running both 3.1 and 2.5. My coworkers are still on 2.5 but will be upgrading shortly.

Post by **LTinker68** » Tue Apr 22, 2008 3:03 pm

If you can confirm that it's still a problem in version 3.1, then you should submit a bug report.

i-tietz · Post by **i-tietz** » Mon Jan 17, 2011 9:12 am

forfear wrote:PS. To remove inline styles in the Table quickly, on the Text Formatting toolbar, clickthe Unformat command.

I just found a bug using this button, so be careful using it:
If I press this button, it depends on what format was applied before:
- if the text was bold before, the "font-weight" is set to "normal"
- if the text was italic before, the "font-style" is set to "normal"
- if the text was underlined before, the "text-decoration" is set to "none"

I reported a bug, because what actually those styles should be deleted, not set to the normal or non-decorated attribute.

wbrisett · Post by **wbrisett** » Fri Jan 21, 2011 12:50 pm

Since this topic was resurrected, I'll chime in.

My biggest Flare project is too big for Flare (25,000 topics), I have broken it up into two separate imports and have to build two different HTML projects and then merge them together in a third project. However, we had more than one request for this content to be available as PDFs, so I have had to build eight (8) different PDFs each consisting of between 1700 and 2400 pages. It's a real pain to generate the PDFs and takes about four hours to complete.

The only other document we create using Flare is about 6100 topics, and like the other document has to be broken up into two builds.

Wayne

joy · Post by **joy** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 1:22 pm

@wbrisett: Interesting. I have just run into this issue via another thread.

http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... a&start=15

So, it seems that, after importing 5300 topics from FrameMaker, I'm now going to have to split my project? Not good...

Do you have trouble generating merged projects?

Post by **NorthEast** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 3:03 am

joy wrote:@wbrisett: Interesting. I have just run into this issue via another thread.

http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... a&start=15

So, it seems that, after importing 5300 topics from FrameMaker, I'm now going to have to split my project? Not good...

Do you have trouble generating merged projects?

I just read the other post - "as a workaround, splitting the TOC into multiple TOCs will work" ; so isn't that suggesting that you split the TOC into multiple files, rather than split the actual project?

joy · Post by **joy** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 5:00 pm

Yes, it was actually, which was much better. And easier! Still not ideal but at least there is a workaround.

Madcap Guru · Post by **Madcap Guru** » Wed Jan 26, 2011 11:29 am

Back in my support days, I had seen a customers project with 13,000 topics in it, and Flare did fairly well with it, but the biggest Robohelp Project I had seen was close to 22000 topics, and could only generate as webhelp, the CHM compiler would crash..

owilkes · Post by **owilkes** » Tue Mar 06, 2012 9:13 am

Ok, this is exactly what I need to know about.

I currently have 15 projects, with topic counts from 100ish up to 4,300. In total, they make up 17,000 topics, and 24,000 images (maybe a few redundant in there)

I'd love them all to be in one mega-project, as would be so much easier to keep things organised - but I already have MAJOR performance issues with the sizes of projects as they are. I can't risk just focing them all together and hoping performance doesnt die on me.

We found that SVN bound inside Flare simply became non-performant after a particular size (using outside flare was fine - but for some reason, the way Flare was using SVN slowed everything down - and yes, I have sent these findings in to MadCap). So now we just have SVN scripts to run before flare launches and after closing it down. That cost us a lot of time.

However, even opening content explorer windows gets too much, the response is very slow - is there an upper limit due to Windows? Or some other bottleneck we could resolve? My machine spec is pretty good (4GB Ram, 64-Bit Windows 7) - but some of my colleagues are less so.

As the project gets larger, what is the biggest bottleneck people are aware of?

Many thanks

wbrisett · Post by **wbrisett** » Tue Mar 06, 2012 11:55 am

owilkes wrote: As the project gets larger, what is the biggest bottleneck people are aware of?

I'm a bit biased, but I think the biggest bottleneck is the memory. As long as the version of .net stays where it is, Flare is stuck being a 32-bit application and can only use 2 GB of RAM. That simply isn't enough for some of the mega projects folks here (myself included) have thrown at Flare. There are workarounds in which TOCs are split and things are reassembled, but they are workarounds and in some cases take a lot of trial and error finding the right mix.

With lots of images, you may find thinks different, but I found that if I open a TOC in the text editor and find line 2500, that's always a good place to break a TOC if you're building a PDF. I usually clone my TOC, find line 2500, and find the matching tags, remove the items from lines 2501 onwards. Save the file and try to build. If that works, then I open the cloned TOC, find the last item I built and remove the content up to that point. Save it and build that TOC (unless it's larger in which case I repeat the cloning and removing process). PDFs typically seem to be the weak point for Flare. I have not however tested any of my huge projects in Flare 8, which is suppose to work better with PDFs.

Wayne

joy · Post by **joy** » Tue Mar 06, 2012 12:03 pm

I agree with wbrisett

I'm a bit biased, but I think the biggest bottleneck is the memory. As long as the version of .net stays where it is, Flare is stuck being a 32-bit application and can only use 2 GB of RAM. That simply isn't enough for some of the mega projects folks here (myself included) have thrown at Flare.

Flare still struggles with my 5500-topic project. I do have split TOCs for PDF targets (and a main TOC for other targets) but it's a pain to maintain because I also use a lot of TOC-level conditions.

I haven't yet tried it with Flare 8 either.

JypeeM · Post by **JypeeM** » Thu Jun 14, 2012 5:13 am

What are the build time for such projects?

I wonder what time it would take to build our Help if we merged a few of our projects. We would have around 7 build target, a total of around 1,000 topics. (Each target would use between 150 and 400 topics).

Some of those projects are already tough to build, but we are getting a RAM update in the next few weeks, and from what I saw, the 8.1 version should be quicker too...

Post by **RamonS** » Thu Jun 14, 2012 5:26 am

It depends on a lot on what the content and complexity of the topics is. Building output is resource intensive, so more RAM is great, but also is a fast(er) processor and especially a speedy disk and controller.

JypeeM · Post by **JypeeM** » Thu Jun 14, 2012 5:34 am

Well, I thought so. That it depended on a lot of factors. When I have some free time, I'll probably do a test to see what it would be like. My colleague aren't sold to the idea of merging projects, I think. So I better have good arguments before pushing the idea.

Well thanks!

nickatwork · Post by **nickatwork** » Thu Jun 14, 2012 5:47 am

The biggest project I build has around 1800 topics, 3000 images and it builds in about 10-15mins. The thing that takes the longest is 5 images that I have have text written in them within capture - processing these takes a minute or so each which really slows it down. But other than that its pretty quick, just enough time to get myself a coffee...

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