Flare applications: How do you use it?

[joyhill]

Just curious about how other people use Flare. I'm involved with creating online help with it, but I kow there are plenty of other uses. Care to share?

[lacastle]

I create online help (WebHelp), but I've seen some good examples of online portfolios and websites made with Flare. Occasionally I export to Word or PDF.

A website/portfolio from doc_guy in this forum: http://paulpehrson.com/portfolio/Conten ... hrson.html
WebHelp samples: http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... =13&t=1015

[doc_guy]

Laura beat me to it... I use Flare for creating my online writing portfolio. Its located at http://www.paulpehrson.com

[forfear]

We use Flare to generate one page System requirement sheets for products, which are actually coming out from a larger installation guide with instructions for five products where we work. Each product specification sheet, has its own product name, with some minor customizations. We set the page border very narrow so to maximize the one page usage.

As part of a larger installation guide project, we use this to single-source our installation and setup instructions into Webhelp, and PDFable MS Word output.

So from one Flare project this produces
- 5 standalone system requirement sheets
- 5 printable checklists customized for each product
- 5 webhelp outputs with the full installation instructions for five products - for an internal sharepoint tech support reference
- 5 MSSWord installation guides for 5 products

[RamonS]

I used Flare twice to create a Knowledge Base.

[Andrew]

We use Flare primarily for HTML Help, and are looking towards a lot more single-sourcing in the future (right now we use Word to produce print documents).

In a number of small projects, however, we've created single-source WebHelp/PDF documents with Flare. We are also using it to create a searchable compilation of our existing paper documentation.

[mitches]

We are using Flare to produce online help (webhelp) and a user's guide (Word) single sourced from one project. The help contains lots of screen shots using Capture. Also, we are doing Mimic & Echo movies and putting links into the webhelp for the movies.

[MikeKatz]

I've been working as a consultant writing HTML online help for packaged software. The main package has over 150,000 users world-wide, and there are half a dozen smaller packages as well.

I also create the manuals, but I'm not a fan of single-source documentation. I prefer to create introductory manuals that are overviews and explain to new users what they can do, not how they do it. Still, some manuals are over 300 pages in the form of annotated screen shots. I create them in Word.

Two products I have contain over 900 topics.

[forfear]

How can we forgett about how Madcap Software uses their own applications to build their own Help system.

If you check the Flare help source, the Madcap Flare help system makes use of conditions with reference to other products as well. Nice. Always wondered how the Getting Started Guide pdf for Flare and the FLare online Help look so seamless, yet so different at the same time.

[forfear]

The new Madcap Flare 4 site now includes a Showcase section link showing customer samples.

Salesforce dev guide - one of the impressive examples of the Flare webhelp and topic customization in process including showing code samples, and heavy customization of divs.

one that is missing i think is the Google Sketchup online webhelp manual..
http://download.sketchup.com/OnlineDoc/ ... suwin.html

Its quite an extensive help file and lots of screenshots. Use of Note icons and Tip icons embedded within steps. also the footer text uses a slightly customized breadcrumb proxy i think.

So looks like flare is used by Google to provide help for their easy to use 3D sketching tool as well. way to go

[LTinker68]

Except that they resized and repositioned my browser. I hate that.