Palimpsest: Flare 5 DITA feature review Part 1: Overview and map files. I really enjoyed this thorough testing and analysis of Flare 5′s integration of DITA. It’s a huge new feature with forward-looking possibilities (namely webhelp output from DITA). Sarah O’Keefe does a nice job looking at all details, quirks, and other issues.

For the next 12 days, I’m coordinating with various companies to give away a product a day, as part of a 12 Days of Christmas in June theme. This is an opportunity to try out new software that may be new to you, for companies to receive a bit of promotion, and to kick off the blog fun that will last all summer long. Here’s … more »

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As) Length: 7 min. In this podcast, Mike Hamilton of Madcap Software talks about their phased approach to handling DITA with Flare. In Phase I, you’ll have the ability to import DITA topics and export to webhelp and other targets. In this sense, Flare functions as a transform engine. … more »

MadCap Blaze: a new publishing powerhouse? | A Technical Communication Community.

WritersUA – The WritersUA Tools Survey – Tools.

This article is a guest post by Daniel Ng. Daniel is part of a small team with an in-house translator. They translate their own English Flare help projects to Simplified Chinese with Madcap Lingo and have been using Madcap Lingo since version 1. Madcap Lingo is Madcap’s offering in the XML-based translation authoring solution space. As a translation memory system, Madcap Lingo helps translators speed up and simplify the translation … more »

For a blog about the latest trends in technical communication, I’ve been conspicuously silent about DITA, the XML standard for technical documentation that is rapidly becoming the norm in the industry. Tonight I realized that I need to examine more closely where I stand on DITA. Several events prompted this. At my work we have a small authoring group that is tool independent. I use … more »

Context-sensitive help in Madcap Flare is pretty easy to set up – you just follow the steps in Flare’s context-sensitive help instructions. However, there’s a usability problem that you must work around for the context-sensitive help to be successful. Let me explain. When the user clicks a context-sensitive help link, a help window appears, as it should. But suppose the user doesn’t close the help window, … more »

Highlights from Doctrain East 2008 — Simplifying Complexity

DocGuy Training (A newly certified Flare Instructor launches his WordPress site.)

Recently the Hat Matrix Blog (aka, the Mad Hatter) published the results of a tools survey that included 590 participants. The respondents were asked what authoring tools they used on a regular basis. They answered as follows: Flare: 40% Framemaker: 33% RoboHelp: 27% Author-it: 13% Dreamweaver: 13% HTML Help Workshop: 12% Madpak: 12% WebWorks ePublisher: 11% helpware FAR: 7% RoboHelp for Word: 7% Adobe Tech … more »

ITauthor podcast #17 – Mike Hamilton talks about Flare 4

ITauthor podcast #16 – Flare and Chrome, the pubcast :: ITauthor.

Topic-Based Writing to the Rescue: Project Considerations for Managers (Case Study). This article is extremely well-written.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 (right-click and select Save Target As to download) Duration: 60 min. Flare 4 was just released today by Madcap Software. In this podcast, I talk with Sharon Burton — product manager at Madcap Software — about all the main features of the Flare 4 release. Flare 4 topics we discuss include the following: