Re: New doc group: FrameMaker or Flare?

[Jefe de redacciÃn <editorialstandards -at- gmail -dot- com>]

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 12:12 PM, Porrello, Leonard
<lporrello -at- illumina -dot- com> wrote:
> Having moved from Help & Manual authoring to Flare authoring in the past six months, I can tell you that the learning curve for Help & Manual is much less steep than for Flare even thought H&M is equally powerful. Among other things, H&M has a very user friendly and truly WYSIWYG authoring interface. This will be important for transient authors. And of course, it has several easy to implement templates, for both HTML Help and PDFs, that can also be changed very easily.
>
> Leonard
[snip]

I came to Flare from RoboHelp.
All I do these days is WebHelp (with Flare, that is -- still some
manuals done in Word for PDF).

At one point, I _tried_ to kick out a supplemental version of my
WebHelp as .doc and .pdf, but it needed a ton of post-publish re-work
(and I "publish"/compile a LOT in the final week or three before
release). Due to having the ToC built nicely for use in WebHelp
format, it created a LOT of duplicate pages when the same project was
output to .doc. There were other problems, but I've forgotten in the
intervening few years.

Does Help & Manual avoid nasties (or bending over backward while
creating a project, in order to avoid eventual nasties) when
single-sourcing multiple output formats?

Flare is certainly rich and intricate, but I keep encountering simple
things that I don't know where to start. After embarrassing myself in
a Flare forum, I'll have an answer, but it turns out to have been just
my peculiar way of framing the original question that made it
unfindable in Flare's own Help.

A couple of times, over the years, I've Googled for a problem or a
Howto and forgotten to specify Flare as the tool. I'd get back hits
for solutions that turned out to be H&M or Doc2Help.  Drat.
Makes me wonder if there's such a thing as temperamental suitability of tools.

But with that said, Madcap support of Flare has always been
top-notch.... and beyond.  Can't beat that with a stick.   :-)


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