Technically Speaking

Users of MadCap Flare were greeted in their e-mail inboxes today with the announcement of an update to Flare V4.2. If you missed it, it might be because it was buried in a message about the new Feedback Server 2 that is now available. To get all the benefits from Feedback Server 2, you have to upgrade to Flare 4.2. That said, I’m not a Feedback user, so I don’t have a lot to comment about on that front. Instead, I’ll focus on some major improvements in Flare 4.2 that make this upgrade a “must.” The major enhancements that I’ve found so far include:

• Dramatically faster build time for PDF targets
• Smaller file sizes for PDF targets
• Auto Save

Dramatically faster build time for PDF targets

The first thing I noticed when I built a PDF target using Flare 4.2 was how fast it was.  I’ve commented in the past about how important hardware is in getting the best build time from a Flare project, but I’ve become accustomed to the build time for my hardware set. Last week in Flare 4.1 I build three PDF targets, then I re-built them in 4.2.  Here is a break down:

So, a group of targets that were taking me a total time of more than 20 minutes to build now build in less than 5 minutes. That is a significant improvement.

Smaller file sizes for PDF targets

The next thing I noticed when I built a PDF target was how the file sizes are dramatically smaller now. This is another place that 4.2 shows huge strides. Check out these file size comparisons between 4.1 outputs and 4.2 outputs from my current project:

There are going to be a lot of happy customers when they see this! My three PDFs used to exceed 50 MB in size (added to our project’s already large download file). Now these same files only take up less than 10 MB in size. Wow.

Auto Save

MadCap has finally introduced a feature that is sure to please long time Flare users: Auto Save. You can set Auto Save in the Tools | Options setting. When enabled, by default, Flare will auto save your topics every 10 minutes. I set mine to five. Back when I was using Flare 3, this would have been huge, huge, huge, because I had serious stability problems with Flare (due to some problems with my computer, it crashed at least once per day). I now have a different system, and combined with my Flare 4 upgrade, I’ve had a serious improvement in application stability. I don’t think Flare crashed even once on me during all of January.

Auto Save is a fantastic improvement, but I’m even more thrilled with the overall stability of Flare, which seems to be much better in the V4 line than it was in the V3 line. But if you’re stuck with some kind of problem like I had on my old machine where some conflict causes Flare to be unstable for you, then you’ll really get bang for your buck for this feature. (Especially since it is a free upgrade for all Flare V4 users.)

Conclusion

I am thrilled with this release of Flare. The improvements for my projects are significant, and I’m not even a Feedback customer. If you are a Flare 4 user, upgrade today. If you aren’t a Flare 4 user, what are you waiting for? Join us in the 21st century. You’ll be glad you did!

—–

Disclaimer: If you aren’t aware, I’m a Flare Certified Trainer, and have been certified MAD (MadCap Advanced Developer). I’m also a MadCap MVP  (volunteer administrator) in the MadCap forums. I’m an avid Flare user and advocate, but not a MadCap employee.

You’ve heard me say it before, and you’ll hear me say it again: I really like MadCap Software. In case you just joined us, MadCap produces my main authoring tool, MadCap Flare. I use Flare to create single-sourced online and printed help for a variety of products.

Several times every week, I will be working on documentation, and I’ll use a feature in Flare (for example, conditional snippets), and I stop and literally say, “Wow. I love Flare.”

Now, you might expect a MadCap MVP (i.e. volunteer forum moderator) and a MadSkills Certified Trainer (which isn’t my day job) to like the company that produces the software. I’ll admit I have a bias. But I became a MVP because I loved the software enough to contribute to the MadCap forums regularly. Then I was invited to join the MVP group. And I didn’t set out to be a Trainer. MadCap actually contacted me, because they know how much I know about and like Flare, to see if I could pick up a training session that the other trainers were unavailable to take.

In any case, when I see a blog entry like this, I have to be even more grateful for the fantastic people in MadCap’s support department. In the post, MK Anderson talks about an unresolved customer service incident with Adobe that has been going on since August (4+ months!). And we’re not talking a complex custom feature request. We’re talking about getting a valid product key, even for a newly upgraded product.

I compare that to the customer service I’ve personally received from MadCap software, and the comparison is stunning. I have bronze-level support from MadCap. Yet, several times, MadCap has CALLED ME on the phone to better understand a technical problem I’ve reported. All my support requests have been resolved within a few days (though some of the resolutions were “we’ve filed a bug” — which is all you an say for some issues). MadCap Support doesn’t give up on difficult to find issues; once there was a bug being reported by a couple of customers, but MadCap couldn’t track it down. They worked with the few customers reporting the issue until we discovered repeatable steps to encounter the issue, then they fixed it that same day. Try getting that kind of support from Adobe.

So here is a shout out to all the fabulous people at MadCap Support. Thanks guys for a job well done! You are a big, big part of what makes using MadCap software a great experience.

When you are writing content in Flare, you may decide that you want to re-use some content that you previously added to another topic.

We’ve discussed before how the best way to do this is to use a snippet, which essentially is a really long, formatted variable.

To do this in Flare, you create a new snippet, then you locate the text you want to re-use, and copy the text out of that topic and paste it into the snippet. Then you replace the text in the original topic with the snippet, then insert the snippet into the new location.

This isn’t too hard, but I’ve long wanted to use a nifty shortcut, but couldn’t figure out how to make it work. See, when you are writing in the XML editor, there is an option on the context menu (right-click) menu that allows you to create a snippet from an existing block. That works great if all you want to add to the snippet is a single paragraph, but it doesn’t work if you want to add multiple block-level elements into the snippet.

Today I thought of a way to do this quickly and easily, even with multiple blocks.

Here is what you do.

1. Open the topic that contains the text that you want to turn into a snippet.
2. Select the blocks that you want to re-use.
3. From the Format menu, select Group.
4. From the pop-up, select the div option. (This groups the selected content into a single block, the DIV block.)
5. Now, right click on the DIV block, and select “Create Snippet”.
6. Give the snippet a name and click the Create button. The snippet is created and inserted into the original topic
7. Go to your new topic and insert the snippet into it.

If you are creating Word or Framemaker output, you may need to change one additional thing:

1. Right click on the snippet block, and select “Open Link”. The snippet file itself opens.
2. Right click on the div block, and from the Edit menu, select “Unbind”.

This removes the div, which can cause positioning problems in Word and Framemaker outputs. (I don’t actually know if you NEED to do this extra step, but it isn’t a bad idea.)

Using a div to create a snippet is much faster, in my opinion, when you are trying to create a snippet from a multi-block selection. Try it, and I think you’ll agree.

—–

(This article has been cross-posted on DocGuy Training.)

If you’ve been following my blog recently, you’re already aware that I’ve received MadCap Certified Instructor status from MadSkills, the MadCap-owned company that provides training on MadCap products. I created a company for my consulting and writing work (I’m currently in the process of writing several books on Flare). Thus, I’m pleased to announce my company’s new website, docguytraining.com.

DocGuy Training’s website will give you tips and tricks on using MadCap products, as well as info on  my upcoming MadCap books. It is where I will discuss training events and other help-authoring tool information.

When you go to the website, you’ll see several different sections. The website is powered by wordpress, and each of the different sections show the most recent post(s) in a specific category. The bottom of the site has a link to the site’s feed; when you subscribe to the feed, you subscribe to posts from all categories, so you’ll be caught up on the latest information, if that is the route you want to go.

Don’t worry that I’m abandoning this site. I’ll still use Technically Speaking to cover lots of general technical writing information, and I’ll occasionally cross post informaiton on both sites.

Come check out my new digs at docguytraining.com and let me know what you think!

I just got the following e-mail from MadCap Software today, encouraging me to purchase Flare. Check out the second link in the message. That made me laugh:

Hi Paul,

I hope all is well.

As a current Flare user, I thought you would be interested in learning that we have just released Flare v4.0 and Blaze v1.0! Blaze is our new print-only solution, while Flare remains the premier tool for printed document and web help authoring. I encourage you to download the new trials and give them a spin: http://www.madcapsoftware.com/downloads/

In addition, please visit this site for a blog article with great insight on Flare 4 you may enjoy: http://blog.paulpehrson.com/2008/09/02/madcap-flare-4-preview/

Finally, and the last link I swear – a newly recorded demo by V.P. Mike Hamilton about the new features in Flare V4: : http://www.madcapsoftware.com/training/demos/flareV4Signup.aspx

[...]

Let me know if you would like additional details or if there is anything that comes up that I can assist with. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
[MadCap Representative]

Pretty cool, eh?