Madcap announced Flare 4

Madcap announced Flare 4 yesterday, and we received email that we can download it now (we have a maintenance plan that includes upgrades). I am eagerly anticipating trying the released version, after fiddling around with the beta for a while. But I also realize there is a lot of work ahead if we are to get everything out of it. I am responsible for our formats and templates, and with a new release invariably there are changes.

In addition, Flare 4 includes the capability to go to print from a single source, but the catch is that you have to add a design for your output for print medium, or in our case, re-implement our Framemaker based design. or however close we can get to it.

My first step is going to be to visit the Flare forums to see what the early buzz is.
After that I will download the Flare 4 software and install and register.
Then test drive it for a couple of days.
Then have one of the other writers guinea pig install it on their system.
Then one by one work with the other writers to install on theirs.
Meanwhile I will be testing out how our current CSS performs with Flare 4, and looking to make some minor changes.

One great thing about Flare is that you can have multiple versions existing on your PC at the same time, so there is much less risk that an upgrade will mess up existing projects, or if the upgrade has key defects, make it impossible for you to produce output. I have had other situations with other company's products where you must de-install the previous version to install the update, which then doesn't work right. Then just try to re-install the old version, along with patches you don't remember installing, only to be told that some registry setting prevents the installations, sorry. What a nightmare that can be.

Working with Flare is not all rum-cake and spiced cider in front of a toasty fire, though. There is no doubt that editing XML files in Flare exposes you to more clunkiness and requires more format thinking than writing in Word or Frame. The good news is that you can use the structures to advantage; the bad news is that you have difficulty avoiding some deep delving to understand why things don't look as you wish.

This is especially the case with older project converted. Flare tries hard to cleanup up residual garbage when converting, and does an admirable though not perfect job. But you will still trip over instances where someone did something tricky in a previous revision in a previous HATT that either conflicts with the XML way, or no longer has the same effect. Sometimes these effects are invisible in the XML editor but very visible in the compiled help. Then you just have to open the internal text viewer and look at the code, and hope you don't delete anything crucial.

But that is with 3.1 and prior versions. I am sure that with Flare 4 it will be church bells and the choir invisibule singing Hallelujah all day long.