I’d Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

Madcap Flare

Madcap Software is preparing to release Flare 4 shortly (an exact date hasn’t been announced). Being the cool people they are, they gave me a free copy of Flare 4 to give away. Flare costs around $899, so this is a deal.
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Madcap Flare is one of the most advanced, functionally robust online help tools for technical writers who want to single source their content. 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.

I just finished converting a help file (which I originally created using RoboHelp 7) into Flare, using version Flare 3.01. I also added quite a bit of content and other enhancements to the help. While working with Flare for about a month, I took careful note of all the things I liked and disliked about Flare. This post is a compilation of my notes.

I also rated the importance of each item on a scale of 1 to 5. In my system, 5 is extremely important, and 1 is relatively trivial. I arranged the numbers in general order of importance. Here are my lists.
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