Second day at MadWorld 2014

A well-rounded program and excellent organisation at the second MadWorld user conference avoided many of the traps that can mar a sophomore effort and point to a way of growth into the future. The second day again saw great informative sessions and networking around doc issues and careers, not to mention lunch and drinks under the San Diego spring sun… 🙂

Advanced single sourcing of content in Flare uses a clever combination of snippets and conditions which are called, not surprisingly, “snippet conditions”. These allow you to maintain reusable chunks of content with slight variations – which one is ultimately displayed is controlled on the topic that contains the snippet.

In his single sourcing presentation, Paul Pehrson had many more tricks up his sleeve:

• To repeat a topic in the same TOC (with or without variation), put the topic content into a snippet and embed it into an empty unique topic container – else your breadcrumb trail in online help goes haywire, because it cannot know which of the two occurrences it should refer to.
• To reuse similar front matter across several PDFs, you can put the front cover, the copyright page, and the table of contents into a TOC of their own, import it as a nested TOC into each target and control the individual differences with variables.
• To maintain individual project styles and corporate styles, create your project CSS and import the corporate CSS into it by using the @import CSS command.
• To share condition sets or variable sets across two projects, store them as External Resources where you can keep them in sync with one another.

The lightning talk round was a very colorful fast-paced session. Passionate speakers addressed widely different topics, including

• A MadCap version of Jeopardy by Pam Coca (“Who is our tech comm game show host?” 🙂 )
• Several ways to avoid inline formatting with the help of Chuck Norris by Scott DeLoach
• MadCap’s latest group of spokespersons: Dentists who recommend Flare for more smiles than any other help authoring tool by yours truly

The 6 topics wouldn’t necessarily have warranted a full session each, but they were fun and valuable to have in a compressed 5-minute format.

Our addiction to meaning gave attendees food for thought as I led them through a quick overview of semiotics and mental models which included Japanese restaurants and misheard song lyrics. In the Q&A session we explored how we could apply such insights into cognition to offer users confidence in their tasks along with meaningful instructions.

Writing, editing and translating topics is frequently done by people who don’t have Flare and don’t need it either.

Mike Hamilton showed several scenarios to address special demands in authoring workflows:

• For writing and editing users of Contributor, you can customize exactly which Flare files, such as snippets, condition and variable sets, are available to them. You can also lock down certain text in Contributor templates to enforce structure and labels.
• For reviewers using Contributor, you can now apply conditions and variables when creating the review package, for example, to keep internal data out of packages for external reviewers.
• For translators of Flare topics, you can create customized export packages and choose to preserve the code of snippets and variables or to convert them into flat text.

For MadWorld 2015, my guess is that we might see fewer sessions on basic Flare techniques which are well-covered in available webinars and other information online. Instead, I’d recommend more sessions that show how MadCap supports tech comm workflows and business cases. These could cover, for example:

• How to integrate documentation and training content with Flare and Mimic
• How to build a business case around single-sourcing topics that can turn tech pubs into a profit center which leverages content as corporate assets
• How to use MadCap’s products in corporate, large-scale products, like Lynn Carrier has shown this year.

Overall, MadWorld was a very instructive, very fun event! The user conference format affords a welcome focus which sometimes gets lost in industry-wide conferences which have to try to satisfy more disparate needs.

CEO Anthony Olivier spoke of welcoming us all to the “MadCap family”. I think that metaphor is stretching it a bit. For me, it feels more like a versatile community of dedicated, often enthusiastic users who get to hang out with one another and with, say, a band we like – and we get to spend some time back stage in the hospitality suite. 🙂

Advertisement

First day at MadWorld 2014

The applicable advice about MadCap products from speakers and staff, the profound discussions about tech comm in general, and attendees’ enthusiasm to share and learn from another make MadWorld 2014 a perfect combination of a tool-centric user workshop and a “regular” tech comm conference.

The hip Hard Rock Hotel adds a flair of giddy excitement – after all, some of us 200 tech writers are a little too nerdy to feel comfortable when they’re treated like rock stars… 🙂

The welcome event started with a tongue-in-cheek video: MadCap’s signature cartoon figure Simon has become addicted to – the horror! – inline formatting. His brave MadCap colleagues stage an intervention to save him… I hope this video will soon come to a Youtube channel near you because it’s a lot of fun to watch!

Product Evangelist Jennifer White introduced many of the MadCap key players in attendance, then MadCap CEO Anthony Olivier welcomed us and encouraged us to join the “MadCap family” to learn and network.

To turbocharge our authoring, Nita Beck showed us how we could bypass some of the pretty, but slow-to-use Flare ribbon features for faster alternatives:

• Custom templates for topics and snippets can include  much of the recommended structure and formatting. Filling in such a template saves the time to manually reconstruct such structure and formatting in just about every template.
• Contributor can be used by tech communicators as a low-distraction alternative to Flare for initial drafts which keeps many of the more complicated features of Flare out of the way for the time being.
• Keyboard shortcuts for many Flare features are faster than doing the same with the mouse.

Pattern recognition elicited a lively Q&A session from the capacity crowd in my presentation. We found that, whatever patterns we recognize, they generally depend on their context in which the retain meaning. From there, we branched out to discuss information architecture and user experience design and how they also rely on patterns.  We also tried to tease out the pattern why my slides had broken the nice arrows and replaced them by the average sign in all places – but one!

Flare projects can support a scalable content architecture, as  Lynn Carrier showed. She described her employer’s project of introducing single-sourcing with Flare to cope with 3000 pages of docs per writer per year. The keys to her successful project were:

• Ownership to involve all writers and tap into each writer’s skills and interests to assure them they weren’t writing themselves out of a job.
• Infrastructure to make sure they have the tools and processes in place to create the deliverables in the structure and quality they customers need.
• Reuse to ensure the most efficient way to single-source content, they carefully mapped out where and when to use snippets, conditions and variables. Conditions are heavily applied on folders and topics move around in the folder structure so they are available for the products and versions where they are needed – and only there.  They use few variables because in-sentence, they create problems during translation.
• Publishing based on TOC templates and target templates ensures consistency in structure and easy maintenance.

Since we have very large projects as well, this was a very valuable session which gave us lots of ideas how to use Flare’s reuse and template features in a corporate environment. Lynn will have another presentation on the second day to show how a wizard enables customers to compile exactly the documentation they need into a PDF. This is something we’ve long thought of doing, so seeing her solution will be a great inspiration for us!

Face-to-face support beats written documentation any time which is why the “hospitality suite” is so great. It’s like walking into MadCap’s helpdesk as if the smartest MadCap users were your colleagues in the next room.

A good balance between sessions and networking opportunities allowed us to trade quirky, but powerful solutions around Flare that users have come up with, to trade career stories and make new friends among a group of technical communicators as diverse and friendly as you could hope to find at any tech comm conference.

Well done, MadCap, I’m psyched for day two!

What’s new in MadCap Flare 10, the nitty gritty

Flare 10, the annual major release of MadCap’s flagship Help Authoring Tool, includes several major enhancements that make Flare easier and faster to newcomers and editors of marketing content. And many smaller enhancements target the hardcore techcomm heavy users. The well-balanced improvements testify that MadCap listens to many of its users.

Today, I’ll focus on the enhancements that I enjoy most – many of them are smaller improvements for heavy-duty tech comm users with large projects and many topics. (An earlier post covered the more obvious strategic enhancements.)

• Improved build times are probably the most crucial enhancement for us. We have some crazy large projects, and we’re happy to see that build times for web help and PDF alike decreased on average by 10 to 30%. Apparently, Flare 10′s re-engineered build process causes more read/write operations. That means a fast hard-disk drive with, say, 7200 RPM or a solid state disk help you to really benefit from the improvements. (If you don’t know your RPM speed, find your HDD model ID in Windows’ Device Manager, search the web for that ID and you’ll find the RPM speed as well.)
• Robustness is improved with a Crash Reporting System. Given our large projects, Flare could be really slow at times and occasionally crash. I don’t recall ever losing any data, but it was still unnerving to see Flare disappear suddenly. I like that Flare 10 has better exception handling and captures a lot of run-time errors with an error dialogue.
• Customised project export allows you to tailor the content you share with other writers, translators or MadCap support. You can export projects not just as a whole, but also by selecting a target, a set of conditions or even file tag settings. For example, you can select a target and export that (along with the target’s conditions applied) to your translator. I use file tags to track topic status and translation language – and I like that I can export complete, stand-alone projects which contain only the relevant topics.
• Customised review packages benefit from the same restrictions, and we can select a target or apply conditions to collect only relevant topics. Oh, and topics in a review package now automatically bring along the snippets the link to which is a nice, intuitive touch.
• A Find and Replace widget in the XML Editor lets me find expressions in the active topic much faster.

• Drag-and-drop for conditions and variables makes it easier to select these elements which are now listed individually in the Project Organizer window and drop them into topics where I need them.
• Apply conditions in the XML Editor. I have several “dimensions” of conditions, such as print vs. online and version A vs. B. And sometimes, I lose track whether I have all scenarios covered. This new feature makes it easier and faster to see when I have content missing for “print + version B”, for example.

• File navigation improvements benefits especially users who have a lot of topics and a lot of topic reuse.
• Find and Replace in Files has been revamped to offer more options for tailored results. You can now search:
  • In the whole project which now includes files in the Project Organizer.
  • In any given folder.
  • In files by name, for example, you can search *.flsnp for all snippet files or t*.* for all task files, if you adhere to such a file convention.
  • For whole words which omits partial matches in longer words.

  You can now also save search results in a CSV file which is helpful if you need to work on results over a longer time.
  Note that Replace All has become less transparent! Previously, this function would open all files with matches, apply the replace, mark them with the “edited” asterisk and save them. In Flare 10, Replace in All Files will silently replace matches in all files currently not open. This is much faster, but there’s no asterisk, no undo, and you don’t even see the replace.

• Word count reports per topic and project. Many of my topics get translated, and our translators need to know how much I’ll send their way. With the new word count reports, I can give them an indicative estimate a few days before I finalise my work and send it off. The Report Editor in Flare 10 now has a Content Files > File Word Count report that counts each file in the Content Explorer, whether it’s an actual topic or a snippet or a template:

There’s also the Project > Statistics report which counts all words in a project – which is especially useful in connection with the customised project export mentioned above.

• Locate in TOC has gotten better. This function finds the selected topic in a table of contents. I use this a lot as I switch back and forth between the back-end topic structure in the Content Explorer window and the users’ view in the table of contents. I can now right-click a topic in the Content Explorer and go straight to Locate in TOC without going through the XML Editor or the Link Viewer. This makes my navigation even faster.
• File preview data at the bottom of the File List, Project Organizer and Content Explorer windows shows details of the selected file. First are the file name, which is redundant, and file type, which I usually know, so that is not very useful yet. The second column shows Date modified which can be helpful. But with long-ish file names, I never see the second column in the narrow, docked windows. So this is a good idea with questionable results. I’m also worried that it will slow down navigation in folders with lots of files, but I have no proof for this.
• Searching in source code now gives faster access to the topic in the XML Editor thanks to an added button.

For more information, consult these MadCap resources:

• The product web page
• The 8-minute video where Deadheads can try to spot a favorite piece of Grateful Dead stage banter in one of the sample screens…
• The 300+ page What’s New Guide in PDF
• The list of customer-reported issues that were addressed, from MadCap’s knowledge base
• The Flare 10 system requirements from MadCap’s knowledge base

What do you think are the most impressive enhancements in Flare 10? And where have they come up short?

What’s new in MadCap Flare 10, the hip parts

Flare 10, the annual major release of MadCap’s flagship Help Authoring Tool, includes several major enhancements that make Flare easier and faster to newcomers and editors of marketing content. And many smaller enhancements target the hardcore techcomm heavy users. The well-balanced improvements testify that MadCap listens to many of its users.

Today, I’ll focus on the more obvious strategic enhancements. A second post covers the enhancements that I enjoy most – many of them are smaller improvements for heavy-duty tech comm users with large projects and many topics.

Out with the geek

Many major changes aim to make Flare more attractive and easier. For the longest time, Flare carried the reputation (some say: stigma) of a steep learning curve. Flare 10 goes a long way towards flattening that curve to help you get going faster. In a way, it means Flare has been de-geekified – and I’m sad to say that the nicely geeky propeller hat logo went into hiding as well.

• The new Start Page offers new output templates as soon as you open Flare to get you started:

The new templates mainly support the recent trend of merging technical and marketing communications. They offer formats such as product brochures from 3- to 6-fold layouts and slideshows. I rarely create new projects from scratch, so this isn’t for me. I mainly need the Start Page to re-open previous projects which I can still do.

• Support of desktop publishing is probably better than ever, thanks to the improved page layout editor and the new support of Open Type fonts. Encroaching on desktop publishing products such as InDesign by rival Adobe, Flare has some strong arguments with its ability to reuse content in tech and mar comm. Since I don’t use DTP products and don’t create mar comm, I cannot judge how convincing Flare ultimately is in this arena.

In with the hip

Two enhancements in online output benefit tech comm and mar comm alike.

• Slideshows present a gallery with horizontal page-by-page navigation as opposed to vertical scrolling:

Slideshow pages can show images, videos, workflow stages, etc., along with descriptive captions and auto-play support. Thumbnails or bullets aid navigation. I really like the slideshows and expect to use them mainly to illustrate or guide users through multi-step workflows. I can also imagine drilling down from a process overview to the individual stages on slideshow pages.

• Responsive HTML 5 output ensures that output resizes automatically to fit mobile and tablet devices, see above. We had entertained the idea of creating separate EPUB targets for tablets, but the flexible responsive HTML5 output is of course much more convenient. It’s another good reason for us to move to HTML5 soon.

For more information, consult these MadCap resources:

• The product web page
• The 8-minute video where Deadheads can try to spot a favorite piece of Grateful Dead stage banter in one of the sample screens…
• The 300+ page What’s New Guide in PDF
• The list of customer-reported issues that were addressed, from MadCap’s knowledge base
• The Flare 10 system requirements from MadCap’s knowledge base

What do you think are the most impressive enhancements in Flare 10? And where have they come up short?

Top 4 reasons that make MadWorld 2014 unique

Four unique reasons make MadWorld 2014 possibly the best tech comm conference you can attend this year. (Disclosure: I’m a happy MadCap Flare user and will speak at MadWorld 2014.)

MadCap’s second annual user conference takes place in the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego, CA, on 13-15 April. It’s featuring not just MadCap’s technical authoring products, but tool-agnostic sessions on DITA, content strategy, professional development, and more. But I think you’ll get the most out of it if you are already using MadCap products or at least very close to doing so. If you are, here are my top 4 reasons that will make MadWorld uniquely useful.

1. Immediately applicable insights

Whether you are relatively new to MadCap or a veteran user, you can pick up helpful tips and relevant advice in sessions “Yeah, Flare Can Do That” and “Ride the Lightning (Talk)”. If you’re stumped for tactical or strategic decisions, you’ll find answers in “Going Solo: Best Practices for the Solo (Flare) Artist” and “We Built This City: Building a Scalable Architecture for a Flare Project”.

Because you know the tools and MadCap knows our tasks, MadWorld eliminates one of the most common complaints of professional conferences: Not quite relevant content. Instead, you can probably find an insight to apply back home in every session. No more “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”! Plus, it’s San Diego.

2. Community networking and support

At MadWorld, you can plug in directly to MadCap’s dedicated and supportive community of users. Many of us folks who help each other on MadCap’s user forum or on LinkedIn will be there. Recently, regional user groups have sprung up in North America and even Europe as MadCap users realise the benefit of a more personal network.

You can hook up with other users to discover what they do with Flare and what ways they’ve found to tweak Flare. That includes the speakers who are regular users, too. Meet them over at MadCap’s blog where they share their expectations and their favorite three songs. I’m looking forward to meeting everyone and to share my experiences – and favorite songs!

3. Prime support included

MadWorld offers personal support from all the guys and gals we might otherwise just know from support emails. I’ve met MadCap staff at other conferences and found them incredibly helpful. They answered any question I threw at them. It felt like free, unlimited access to the proverbial soda fountain. MadWorld’s Hospitality Lounge by comparison is like an open door to the soda factory. I for one plan to bring a couple of crazy projects and indulge… 🙂

4. San Diego in the springtime

Yes, it’s been snowing and raining a lot and in unexpected places, too. But not in San Diego. Not for a looong time, as Jennifer from MadCap reminds us:

The last snow in SD was on 12/13/67! RT@ellispratt Something I thought I'd never ask:Will it be snowing in San Diego in April? #Madworld2014

— Jennifer White (@MsJennWhite) February 14, 2014

So I expect spring to be in full swing by the time we get there. Add to that the Hard Rock Hotel in the Gaslamp Quarter, the world-famous zoo and the beaches, and I start to sound like a tourist ad.

————————–

To sum up, I look forward to MadWorld, a conference with boot camp intensity and summer camp fun!

P.S. I will speak in the tool-agnostic track on cognitive foundations of tech comm:

• You’d Better Recognize! Pattern Recognition For Technical Communicators, on Mon, 14 April, 11:05 am
• Addicted to Meaning: Mental Models for Technical Communicators, on Tue, 15 April, 1:30 pm

And I’ll be on board for the round of lightning talks on Tuesday at 10:55.

Update, 10 March: techwhirl lists 5 Reasons to Attend MadWorld 2014, citing a total of 61 pieces of evidence!

Top 5 reasons I look forward to TCUK13

TCUK13 kicks off in Bristol next week, and here are my reasons why I’m very excited about it!

Intimate, professional conference

Of all the conferences I know, TCUK is the most intimate, almost cozy conference, attended by professional, engaged tech comm’ers. There’s none of the stimulation overload or anonymity that can mar larger events. This will be my fourth year in a row, and in past years, I’ve loved every minute – and cursed my travel schedule which made me miss the occasional closing session…

Versatile programme of presentations

For “only” three streams of presentations I think TCUK managed to schedule very versatile sessions. The conference website lists all subject areas, but these are my personal favorites:

• Managing Tech Comm (the focus topic this year)
• Case Studies
• Content Strategy

… and I’m proud to contribute to the versatility with my own presentation “Addicted to meaning: Mental models for technical communicators“! 🙂

Practical, applicable advice

Nothing impresses my managers and colleagues more than bringing back directly applicable advice from a conference! TCUK has several sessions dedicated to specific Tools & Techniques. Also, for you Flare folks out there, TCUK will see the launch of the youngest ISTC special interest group: The MadCap UK & Europe user group, will hold its inaugural meeting as a TCUK fringe event on Wednesday, September 25 at 5 pm in the Terrace Bar of the conference hotel.

A fully booked workshop!

Chris Atherton from TCUK10 and TCUK11 fame and I will run a workshop “Bake your own taxonomy” about developing a documentation structure, with the emphasis on doing justice to existing, unstructured content – and with a week to go, the workshop is already fully booked. Chris and I are wowed by the overwhelming interest – not to mention spending an extra hour or two to make it worth everybody’s while! (If you had planned on attending, but didn’t register with the good folks at ISTC yet, we might have a couple of seats in case of no-shows, but we can’t promise you a spot at this time…)

Bristol!

One of my regrets at last year’s TCUK was that I spent no time at all visiting Newcastle – and envying those who did. So this year, I’m hoping to take some time to visit Bristol. The conference website has some initial tips for those of us who do.

If you’re a European tech comm’er, especially if you’re a European MadCap Flare user, I hope to see you in Bristol next week!

UK MadCap user group launches with two events

MadSIG, the MadCap UK & Europe user group, launches with two events in the UK in September. We are a handful of MadCap users who network to share expertise and support. Most of us are based in the UK, though I’m the Europe outlier who’s based in Germany (and sometimes Denmark).

MadSIG offers occasional meet-ups and also a LinkedIn group for feedback, ideas and resources. If you are a sole technical author, become part of a more personal group – in your own virtual home town rather than in the big city of the online forums!

MadSIG is a special interest group under the ISTC‘s umbrella – while you don’t need to be an ISTC member to join and participate, it’s certainly a good idea to take advantage of the society’s many benefits.

Meet with MadCap’s Mike Hamilton in Staines on 19 Sep

Mike Hamilton from MadCap is going to be at the Swan Hotel and Pub, The Hythe, Staines TW18 3JB, on Thursday 19th September from 7pm onwards. He’s generously offered to spend the evening talking MadCap with anyone who uses Flare and the other MadCap products, or is interested in finding out more about them.

If you would like to come, please let us know by email to MadSIG@ISTC.org.uk with your contact details, so we can update you if anything changes last minute. If you’ve got any specific topics you’d like to talk about, feel free to let us know, too.

Mike Hamilton has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the MadCap products, so bring your questions and, if you like, your projects, and get to know some other Flare fanatics from the South of England at the same time.

Inaugural MadSIG meeting at TCUK on 25 Sep

MadSIG holds its inaugural meeting at TCUK 2013. If you’re at TCUK anyway, this is your easiest chance to meet other MadCap users. We’ll meet at the Terrace Bar of the Marriott conference hotel on Wednesday, 25 Sep at 5 pm.

This meeting is a TCUK fringe event – that is, it is organised by us delegates, not by the conference itself. We are grateful that TCUK provides space and publicity.

Easiest way to add video to your tech comm

A very cheap and easy way to add video – or more honestly: almost video – to your documentation is to use animated gifs. In less formal, less complex settings, that can be totally sufficient.

For example, a translator asked us for the list of Flare topics that correspond to the table of contents. And I want to show other writers how to get such a list out of Flare. It’s a couple of clicks in the TOC editor which can easily be illustrated in an animated gif:

The gif above was created using the freeware LICECap which records screen movements and mouse-clicks. The 30-second “video” took 5 minutes to throw together, it’s 407 KB large and displays in any web browser without any codecs.

It’s certainly not the most professional way ever devised and there are no use controls whatsoever – but if you just need to illustrate a few clicks, this will let you get the job done quickly and for free!

Oh, and if you’re using Flare, you might have picked up a trick for the TOC editor along the way… 🙂

Optimize MadCap Flare for large projects

MadCap Flare can be slow with large projects and choke sometimes, but there are a few tweaks that can help you to optimize your editing experience and to keep your sanity. By large projects, I mean more than 20,000 topics and snippets, that’s when it gets hairy for me. By contrast, I also work a lot in a project with close to 1,000 topics and snippets and that size is not critical at all for my PC’s performance or my sanity.

All these tips work with Flare 9, and I believe they work with Flare 8, too, but I haven’t checked.

Tweaking performance

There are a few settings which have a big influence on Flare’s performance, especially in large projects. However, consider each one carefully – after all, you may actually need that function…

• To improve performance in text editing:
  • Uncheck the File > Options > XML Editor > Text Rendering options
  • Disable File > Options > Auto Suggestions

• To improve performance in file handling:
  • Hide conditional indicators in Content Explorer
  • Apply restrictive filters in the File List, as opposed to displaying most of the files

• To improve performance of Analyzer:
  • Uncheck the File > Options > Analyzer > Advanced Scan options
  • Set File > Options > Analyzer > Search Limits to 100

Keeping Flare’s “desktop” tidy

Flare’s “desktop” area with its tabs is seductive, because you never notice how many toipcs you have open until you hunt down one. To keep your contents safe and your Flare “desktop” tidy, use these options in File > Options > General:

• If you don’t need Flare to reopen the same files as in your last session, uncheck Auto-Reload Documents.
• To minimise potential loss of content, set up Auto-Save Documents. (I think the peace of mind outweighs the performance cost…)
• To keep your “desktop” clean, allow Flare to close topics you don’t need by setting Close others when opening new document. I like the option Close others with same extension and no changes, which keeps open the File List and Analyzer reports, but closes all the topics that I poked around in without working in them. You might prefer a different setting, though…

If you have other tips up your sleeve to improve Flare’s performance, please share them in the comments.

Top 5 things I like about Flare 9

MadCap Software has released a new major version of Flare, the help authoring tool I use, with much fanfare. I focus on enhancements that are most useful to me in my daily work. They are minor compared to, say, the new support of right-to-left languages, but I appreciate them because they make my work easier! For the major enhancements, visit the Flare product website.

5. WebHelp can search for partial words

The search in our standard WebHelp output can be enhanced to find partial words. (Note that performance may hurt since this option increases the size of the output, specifically of the search database.)

4. New “Condition” option in right-click menu

I can now select text or paragraphs in a topic and apply a condition by using the right-click menu. Previously, I needed to use a ribbon option (or maybe a keyboard shortcut?). While this is merely another way to add a condition, I find it convenient and supporting the way I work.

3. “Add File” dialog uses current location

Flare 9 behaves differently when I add a file, such as a topic, an image or a snippet! The “Add File” dialog now uses the current location, not some default location as before. So the new file will go “wherever I am” in the Content Explorer!

I like this for two reasons:

• I almost never add topics to the default folder, so I had to change the file location just about every time.
• And conversely, I won’t accidentally drop topics into the Main folder anymore where I don’t expect them…

2. Styling a table cell no longer trashes the table code

A bug would break the XML when I tried to apply a span tag to the complete content in a table cell. As a workaround, I could apply an extra unstyled space – or fix the code in the code view.

It’s a small bug fix to be sure, but it annoyed me enough that I (along with other users) submitted a bug report – and today I heard back in an email that they had actually fixed it. So this one is nice also for showing MadCap reacts to user requests!

1. Synced split-view of topic and XML code

This featured enhancement is a big help to me: I really like the “open everything” approach of Flare where I can access content and even settings files as ASCII text files and monkey around in the code, if I’m so inclined. Sometimes, I find it’s easier and faster to fix a table or a nested list in the code rather than the editor. And Flare is cool for letting me do that.

But: So far, it could be tedious to move from the regular editor to the code view and locate the place I want to fix. The new synced split-level view makes my geeky way of editing much faster as I can seamlessly move back and forth between topic view and code view!

– If you use MadCap Flare 9, what enhancements or bug fixes do you like?