I've been using the product for roughly five years and continue to find it to be a very cost effective way to create a 'real' documentation and authoring work flow that can be expanded and refined to serve the needs of small to large content development and output requirements.įlare the product is enhanced by the quality of its vendor, Madcap Software. The need is instead to create reusable topics that can then be assembled into a variety of output combinations and readily delivered in a variety of print and online output formats.įlare contains a rich set of topics-based authoring, content management, and output packaging features.

Later that work flow was expanded to become 'authoring tool plus something else', where 'something else' was a separate tool that extracted content from the authoring tool's content files and generated that content in an online format such as online help (OLH).įor today's technical communicator, it's a form of vocational suicide to imprison reusable information inside monolithic chapter files. When I began technical writing in 1998 the primary authoring method was to assemble chapter files into books for delivery as PDF manuals. Overall: Madcap Flare provides a highly effective single-product way to create and manage a superset of topics based content that can then be packaged and delivered as required. I put off learning Regular Expressions and did a lot of hand work that could have been automated.īut the output is nice, and I'll try to leave another review once I've been 'authoring' new content. You have to use it yourself in the real world.īe prepared to learn HTML, CSS, and Regular Expressions if you don't already know them. You can't simply get trained to support this product.

I'm not saying the support folks are rude or deliberately unhelpful - just inexperienced. OTOH Support once went above and beyond and called me with a complex answer. Or maybe they're more knowledgeable? Dunno. I haven't experienced Platinum tech support, but at least then you find out right away if they don't know the answer. Several times I've written back to tell them there IS INDEED a way to do what I wanted, or there's a BETTER way than what they said. But that's OK, because by the time they get back to me (supposed to be 24 - 48 hours, but often more) I've usually figured out the answer on my own. 'Bronze' tech support,(email only) often doesn't know the answers. The pieces that must come together to produce a project are tucked away in various nooks and crannies, and good luck finding them on your own because nobody's going to tell you where they are. Haven't yet used it as an 'authoring' tool because I'm still working on the import. Overall: I've spent months learning Flare to import large documents (total ~100,000 words ~2,400 images) to produce online help.

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