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A review of MadCap Flare Help authoring software

Carol Johnston investigates whether the latest Help authoring tool is likely to tempt Help developers away from their old favourites.

By Carol Johnston. 11 June 2006

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Introduction

MadCap Flare is a new Help authoring tool based around an XML editor. (As far as I know, to date, it is the only one.) The MadCap development team includes the people who created RoboHelp. The RoboHelp product is now owned by Adobe and its future development is uncertain. So migrating to Flare is particularly attractive for RoboHelp users.

Because of Flare's RoboHelp roots I will be making some comparisons between the two tools as I go along.

The user interface

Flare's user interface is highly configurable (Figure 1). You can determine where and how different areas are displayed (on the left or right, dockable, auto-hide, floating). This is an innovative feature, but I recommend beginners only start experimenting with it after becoming comfortable with the default view settings.

The main working area is a tabbed interface. This means that you can have many different project 'elements' (for example: topics, the Styles Editor and the TOC Editor) open at the same time. This makes it easy to jump from one element to another; a much more efficient way of working than having to close one thing before opening another.

Screenshot from MadCap Flare

Outputs

Flare provides four output formats:

  1. DotNetHelp: A new Windows Help format, developed by MadCap, that also supports .NET applications. It has a special viewer (the Flare Help viewer), which is freely distributable. The viewer looks very similar to Flare's own user interface (Figure 2).
  2. Microsoft HTML Help: This is the standard Windows Help format.
  3. WebHelp: An uncompiled format for browser-based Help, this is similar to RoboHelp's WebHelp.
  4. Microsoft Word: For printed documentation, this requires Word 2003 with service packs. As I have not upgraded to Word 2003, I can't test this output. I do know, however, that (unlike RoboHelp) links and cross-references are preserved.

Targets define the output format, location and other settings. You generate an output by 'building a target'. You can create your own targets. (This is equivalent to RoboHelp's single source layouts.)

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