Re: First Thoughts on MadCap Flare

[Bill Swallow <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com>]

> 1) I couldn't import my test RH project until I stripped out all the
> instances of
> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html">
> This is not a great thing to be unable to cope with!

Flare's not the only tool that barfs on that. What you're looking at
is malformed markup.

> 2) It did one of the things that I find most profoundly unlovable about
> RH: rewrote my CSS
> to something that is both technically ugly and nonequivalent. Minus a
> zillion points.

Can you elaborate?

> 3) Some weirdness happened with internal anchors. For example (links and
> text obfuscated to protect the paranoid)
>
> <a name="w" id="w">W</a> correspond to X in the <a href="Y.html">Y</a>
>  <a href="Z.html">Z</a>.
>
> became
>
>  <a name="W" id="W"></a> correspond to X in the
>  <a href="Y.html">Y</a><a href="Z.html">Z</a>. <MadCap:snippetBlock
> src="Resources\Snippets\myfooter.flsnp" />W
>
> Maybe it's just me, but I would think that no matter how little you
> trust your users, you can safely assume that nobody actually wants their
> anchor text de-anchored and moved to beneath the document footer. Or to
> have spaces between words in the text removed.

That's a good one. You should report that.

> Maybe there are solutions to these things. I haven't given  up hope. But
> I'm no longer as excited as I was this morning when I first tried to
> download.

That's too bad. Considering it's not even technically a 1.0 product
yet, and your issues are already in the weeds, I'd say that's pretty
darn good. It'd be more upsetting if "Flare ate my RH project" or
"Flare can't read my CSS in import". Considering it's doing something
with what you feed it, and that you're able to isolate issues like
this, I'd say the product is performing reasonably well on its way to
the gate. I'm sure your direct, detailed feedback to MadCap would be
helpful and appreciated, as well.

--
Bill Swallow
HATT List Owner
WWP-Users List Owner
42.8162,-73.7736
http://techcommdood.blogspot.com
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