When Flare was first announced it was against the background that Macromedia was not developing RoboHelp any further. There was also speculation that RoboHelp's proprietary WebHelp output would not work under Internet Explorer 7. I therefore volunteered and was accepted to test the beta versions of Flare.
The major problem that I had with Flare was producing merged webhelp as described below and to the best of my knowledge, these issues have not changed. If they are important to you, then check the current situation with MadCap.
Then Adobe announced that they were going to develop RoboHelp and the release of IE7 in beta form showed that webhelp continued to work without problems. After much deliberation, I decided that realistically I could not use Flare for my professional needs and unless I was using it for real, I could not "support" it in the way that I do for RoboHelp.
I had started some Flare pages and the topic on Amalgamating Flare Projects may still be of some help so I will leave the content of that on my site for the time being. I have removed all other pages though assuming that the issues have been fixed in the later versions.
For me these were signficant problems. They may be of no consequence to you.
| Links between projects do not work | In my topic on merging webhelp with RoboHelp I explain how parent / child links are broken. Flare works in a different way which breaks all links between different any project. Whilst I found a workaround, I had to conclude that for as long as RoboHelp worked, it was a simpler solution. This is because the structure in the output gets changed and the relative path is not the same as when you created the link. MadCap are aware of this and hopefully it will be fixed. For now though all you can do is a Find and Replace operation on your links. Click here for details. |
| TOC only shows a single book for the child projects | In RoboHelp, if a child project had say three books then you could set things up in the merge so that either you just had one book in the merge that opened to show the three books OR you could show the three books directly in the merged TOC. Flare is different and will only see the single book. I suspect that if you locate the toc.xml file in the Data folder in the output, it may be possible to rearrange things there. |
Date |
Changes to this page |
| 06 May 2007 | Other Flare topics except Amalgamating Projects removed. These were based on early versions. |
28 May 2006 |
New topic. |