What to know when switching from RoboHelp to Flare

30 Sep

Posted by admin as Flare, HATT, RoboHelp, tools

MadCap Flare was developed (at least initially) by the group that built RoboHelp, now an Adobe product. When MadCap released the first version of Flare, they wanted the interface to be easy to grasp for RoboHelp users to reduce the pain of switching. I played with the trial version of Flare 1 and found it fairly easy to find my way around—and this was back in the days of RH X5.

I recently switched from RoboHelp 7 to Flare 5. I’m not the person to ask about the merits of one over the other because I don’t have enough experience with Flare yet. Because I’m coming to version 5 with my knowledge being only that which my colleagues have told or shown me, I hope to make life easier for anyone moving from RH to Flare or at least trying Flare out. Given your background with RH, I want to help you avoid using up time trying to become oriented with the concepts that Flare is based on.

The Flare workspace layout

Something you won’t be used to is the down arrows next to the File menu or the little X next to each toolbar. Clicking gives you a list of toolbars you can open, and clicking an X closes the toolbar. Kind of convenient, but they’re not usual components of a Windows application interface, so it takes a little getting used to.

Look for your topics, images, and snippets in the Content Explorer. The rest of the things you’re used to seeing in RH’s Project Manager and Project Setup pods are in the Project Organizer.

In Flare, everything you edit opens in the same area as the XML Editor by default. You have to float them to move and dock them somewhere else by first right-clicking on the tab and selecting Float, then shifting it to where you want it. A slight blue shading indicates where the pod will dock when you let go.

There are certain things that you can display in pods, but other things insist on displaying in the main editor area. For example, the Content Explorer, Project Organizer, Index Explorer, and Styles windows can be docked and shown as pods in your environment’s layout. However, Flare likes to open just about everything else in the main editor area, such as your target editors, TOC editors, and help topics (I’m talking about Flare’s own help, not yours). You can save and load layouts by going to the Window > Layouts flyout menu, but certain things don’t stick.

For example, in RH, I liked to have my TOC in a pod along with the index and glossary. In trying to replicate this, I floated the TOC editor and then docked it where I had it in RH (as recommended by Flare’s instructions on replicating your RH interface). But the next time I opened Flare, it had forgotten that my TOC was in its own pod. It was open in the main editor area again.

Unfortunately, Flare also doesn’t have a multiple-document interface as RH7+ does, unless you count floating your topics and lining them up side by side.

One of the first things you may notice is that in the Content Explorer (comparable to the Project Manager pod in RH), topics have boxes next to them. Those aren’t check boxes. Instead of applying diagonal colored lines to topic titles to indicate conditional build tags, the color is applied to those boxes. Multiple colors appear in a box if you have multiple tags applied to a topic. These boxes are called conditional indicators, and you can toggle them by clicking the button that contains blue and green squares in the Content Explorer’s toolbar.

Converting a RoboHelp project to the Flare format

If you have a RoboHelp project that you typically open via the .xpj file, you can’t begin the conversion to a Flare project by using the Open File button or going to File > Open. Instead, go to File > Getting Started Wizard. Being a wizard, it takes you through the steps to import the RH project. (Though I found it strange that when you choose the option to import an RH project, the Finish button takes you to the second step of the wizard. Then you click Finish again when you’re actually at the end of the wizard.)

Don’t worry that Flare will somehow wipe out your RH files. You have to specify a new location for the new Flare files created from the conversion to be stored.

Styles

You can use the Styles pod to create and edit styles (View > Style Window). There are a few ways to apply styles:

The quickest way to apply styles is to keep the Styles pod open and then click a style when you want it.
Click the arrow next to a selector in Text Format toolbar (to the left of the XML Editor) and select the style.
Click in the text, hover over the little gold bar underneath the first word till it expands (or click orange icon off to right), click it, go to Style Class, and choose the style. This probably isn’t the best way to handle styles, but a load of other options appear in that menu.

The XML editor

RoboHelp has a WYSIWYG editor, but Flare’s topic editor is different. One of the most important pieces of advice I can give you is to not think of the XML Editor as a WYSIWYG editor or you just may drive yourself crazy.

As DocGuy Paul Pehrson tells me, the intent of the XML Editor is to show you what you have—content, tags, conditions, and so on. So it shows you more than what you’ll get in the final output. You will see some basic styling applied, but more advanced styling may not appear correctly in the XML Editor. The XML Editor also provides the XML tag bars on the side so you can select chunks of content.

When you preview a topic, what you see depends on your primary target. If it’s WebHelp, you’ll see an Internet Explorer-based preview; if it’s PDF, you’ll see a PDF preview, and so on. To see the code behind a topic, click the Send this file to the text editor icon in the XML Editor toolbar.

Wrapping up

Becoming a Flare user, especially after using RoboHelp for years, can be challenging. If possible, start with a new project and learn the basics. Wait until you are familiar with Flare to convert existing projects over. That way, you can hit the ground running with those projects.

See the Transition from RoboHelp Guide for more information by going to the Help menu.

Good luck with your transition to Flare!

About the author: Ben Minson works in the United States as a technical communicator for a tech-savvy religious organization. He blogs about tech comm and otherwise makes things up at GryphonMountain.net, and tweets too. In his limited spare time, he leads the local STC chapter, acts as his wife’s comic relief, and bends to his black Labrador’s constant need to be scratched behind the ears.