When the drop-down text is expanded, the twisty arrow points down. The drop-down hotspots have little twisty arrows at the top to indicate their state - collapsed or expanded. And I can quickly select the style I want. If I'm in a paragraph block, paragraph styles appear. If I've selected a word, character styles appear. The styles that appear are related to text I've selected. When I press F12, Flare's style pane opens and stays open. Except for a bug about cross references pointing to bookmarks in drop-down hotspots, the cross reference feature works pretty well. When I generate my Word target, cross references I created in Flare indicate the correct page numbers of the topics they link to. The concept and implementation of cross-references (as opposed to just hyperlinks) is a major step forward for single sourcing - at least when printed documentation is one of your outputs. Indexes are key features in print manuals - and indexes need to be accurate. You'll want your index words to point to the right pages. Embedding index keywords in topics (rather than just within headings) is critical if you have numerous hotspots on a page or have long pages and plan to generate printed output. I can add index keywords half way through the topic if I want. This is the most important feature for me because I want to single source my content. Although there are still some minor things to edit and check, the Word output is definitely impressive. When I generate printed documentation, the Word output looks almost perfect, especially the numbering and margins. I arranged the numbers in general order of importance. In my system, 5 is extremely important, and 1 is relatively trivial. I also rated the importance of each item on a scale of 1 to 5. While working with Flare for about a month, I took careful note of all the things I liked and disliked about Flare. I also added quite a bit of content and other enhancements to the help. I just finished converting a help file (which I originally created using RoboHelp 7) into Flare, using version Flare 3.01. When you use Flare to create an actual project (rather than just experimenting with a trial version), you come to know the ins and outs, the major benefits and the quirks, its usability and learning curve, the things you love and the things you hate. Madcap Flare is one of the most advanced, functionally robust online help tools for technical writers who want to single source their content. Tip: For an updated perspective on this post, see Guest post: 10 New Things to Love and Hate About Flare. Academic/Practitioner Conversations Project.Author in DITA and Publish with WordPress.Reflecting seven years later about why we were laid off.A hypothesis about influence on the web and the workplace.
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