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On Wednesday, August 12, 2015 2:34 PM, Brian Gilbert wrote:
We had a large DITA project (large for us...thousands of topics and about 700-800 pages for a compiled PDF). Using DITA, it could take 15 minutes to over an hour, depending on how you were accessing the files, to generate a PDF. Converted to Flare (saved on software costs, server costs, etc.). There were some pain points in that Flare didn't convert to Word as easily as PDFs (which we discovered), and getting the skins and style sheets set up wasn't the easiest.
However, Madcap's support was terrific! They helped resolve all of our issues. It now takes 3-4 minutes to generate our documents (we don't have a lot of graphics, but do have a number of customizations depending on the audience). It has been great. Took about 6-8 weeks to get the template working with our imported topics, but has been running quickly ever since. Quite a bit of time was spent trying to figure things out on our own. Madcap really came through for us.
The nice thing is that we got the Word version working (for SMEs to review) and can generate an online help version in the future.
On Wednesday, August 12, 2015 2:59 PM, Steve Janoff wrote:
Wow, there are some huge projects out there!
Appreciate hearing about both of these.
We solved our problem just today, by chance.
Turns out it's a non-problem. We had been searching too high in the folder hierarchy (entire project folder).
When we confined our search to the Content folder under the project folder, we came up with virtually no hits (for the bad stuff).
Amazing.
So I guess Flare is okay with large projects as long as you know what's going on and where everything is. My recollection with the big DITA systems is that they take care of most of that for you. Although, I've seen errors made there too.
Thanks for the inputs and if there are more stories, I'd love to hear them. Amazing to hear some of the scale.
Steve
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