For many years, the dominant tools in the help authoring market were RoboHelp and WebWorks Publisher, but in 2004 there was a major shakeup. Macromedia Corporation bought eHelp, and then in turn was acquired by Adobe. Along the way, the original RoboHelp developers were laid off. A core group of developers founded a new company, MadCap Software with the goal of building a new help authoring tool that RoboHelp users would feel comfortable using, but one built with modern and standards-compliant technology. (For the full story, listen to the podcast of Mike Hamilton's Flare demo on the Tech Writer Voices site). The result was Flare, which was announced two years ago at the WinWritersUA conference, released later that year, and is now up to version 2.5.
Unlike WebWorks Publisher, which is essentially a sophisticated filter for single-sourced content, Flare is a true help authoring tool. You can create help projects in Flare without any other tools or documents. You can import RoboHelp projects (but not Webworks projects), or Word, FrameMaker, or HTML files. You can also use Flare as a single sourcing tool, writing in Word or FrameMaker and reimporting your content into Flare when you make changes. Flare is more limited than WebWorks in its output options, which are HTML Help, WebHelp (a browser-based format), DotNetHelp (a MadCap-developed format designed to work with Visual Studio 2005 applications), HTML and PDF.
Installation is straightforward. The installation file is a 90 MB download. After installation, you'll need to confirm registration via a link that's emailed to you. Product documentation includes online help (done in MadCap's DotNet format), a 205-page Getting Started Guide in PDF, and several hours of video tutorials that cover topics ranging from the basics (Touring the Flare Workspace) to more advanced topics like single sourcing. MadCap's web site also has a knowledge base and user forums.
The most recent release of Flare, version 2.5, has been updated to support both import and export of Word 2007 files and to run under Microsoft Vista, something that Adobe couldn't manage in its recent release of RoboHelp 6. If you have Office 2007 and have installed Microsoft's PDF add-in, you can also export to PDF and the new Microsoft XPS file format.
Flare's interface is similar to RoboHelp's and to a lesser degree, WebWorks ePublisher's. At the top of the window, there are the usual menus and toolbars. In a left pane, there are tree views of either your content or your project's resources. In the right pane, you can display your content or the resources you're working with. At first, I found the interface a bit daunting and somewhat gaudy, being used to the rather more spartan interface of WebWorks ePublisher, but it didn't take long to learn it. Toolbars and menus are fully customizable as well. Given the complexity of the Flare interface, and the number of topics and resources you can have open at once, a second monitor would be a wise investment.
Figure 1: Flare's Target editor for selecting and editing your output format
MadCap has added some nice touches to the standard Windows controls. When you select an something, (for example, a word formatted in bold text), the insertion cursor changes to show you the element boundaries (an element being something that you can select, and which may correspond to an XML element in Flare's source files). Elements are also shown by element bars in to the left of the text. These let you select and move elements while providing a visual indication of the the element or block of text that you're working with. A separate set of element bars appears when you're working in tables.
Flare had no problems with importing a file in Word's .docx format. When creating a project by importing a Word file, you are given the option of creating topics by splitting them at heading (or other) paragraphs. You can also choose the language, and yes, Canadian English is one of the options. Other options allow you to create previous/next links and choose a minimum topic size. On importing the file, I found that Flare had deleted all tracked revisions in the file. Accepting revisions and reimporting fixed that problem. The format of the file closely matched that of the original Word document, as expected. The same was true of imported FrameMaker files.
Flare uses Cascading Style Sheets to control its formatting. If you're familiar with CSS, you'll have no problems controlling or changing formats in Flare. Using CSS classes makes it easy to control the format of text across an entire project. You can also apply formatting overrides or use direct formatting and ignore the CSS styles completely. Flare also lets you group styles into style sheets, which you can apply to either topics or tables to help maintain a consistent appearance.
Like FrameMaker, Flare allows you to create master pages, which you can apply to topics in both the online and printed output. If you're using them in printed output, this is where you would add page numbers, headers, and footers. Master pages can also contain breadcrumb links and mini-TOCs for groups of topics.
For more control over formatting, you can apply skins, which can completely change the appearance of a project. Flare's skin editor allows you to control the size and location of the help window, which buttons appear in the toolbar, the format of the tabs, style of the TOC and index, and many other items. I much preferred Flare's approach to skins to that of WebWorks ePublisher, which offers more skins out of the box, but requires manual editing of files and graphics to change many of the skin elements. You can preview your changes, and although the preview uses a sample project instead of your own, it's still a real time saver.
Figure 2: Flare's preview window
You have a great deal of control over navigation in your topics. Flare supports standard text hyperlinks and image hyperlinks, including image maps. Linking includes concept links ("See also" or A-links), related-topic links, and keyword links (K-links). You can also create browse sequences for your whole project or for groups of topics that you consider to be related.
You can create popups, including both tooltip popups and popup topics. As well, Flare supports RoboHelp-style expanding text (which they call a toggle link) and drop-down text links, similar to those in WebWorks. Multimedia support includes movies created with MadCap's Mimic product and Abobe's Flash. You can also insert audio into your projects, if you have Echo, another MadCap product.
Snippets and variables promote re-use of content. Snippets are chunks of content that you write once and insert into more than one topic. Flare also provides several types of variables that you can use for terms like product names. Variables can be grouped into sets to make them easier to manage. Flare also supports condition tags, and you can apply them to many different elements of your projects, not just text. For example, you can conditionalize style sheet files, tables of contents, and table rows and columns.
Flare supports several methods for making your help projects context sensitive. You can import and use header files created by your developers, or you can create your own. Flare's documentation provides step-by-step instructions on working with header files, aliases, and topic IDs - it's among the best and complete documentation that I've seen for creating context sensitive help.
Output files are a mix of XML, CSS, and HTML, depending on your chosen target. I looked at the HTML generated for Flare's WebHelp format to see if it was any cleaner than that generated by WebWorks ePublisher. It is, but it's still not very pretty, although it renders perfectly in both IE and Firefox. Despite having proprietary file extensions, Flare's project files are XML, which should make it easy to store projects in source control repositories.
So, where does this leave us? It's pretty clear that MadCap Software is now one of the dominant players, if not the dominant player, in the help authoring field. Starting from scratch, they've created a suite of products that covers most documentation tasks. Their products are standards-based, compatible with the latest version of Windows, and are tightly integrated.
Even if you don't need any of the other tools, Flare certainly merits your attention if online help is your primary deliverable. It's got RoboHelp beat hands down in almost every area. About the only reason to even consider using RoboHelp instead of Flare is if you have to create WinHelp. But if that's not the case, moving from RoboHelp to Flare is a no-brainer.
It's a harder choice if you have to single source your documents. While Flare lets you create PDFs from help projects, and reimport documents that you've changed outside of Flare, authors who are used to FrameMaker's long document features, or need tight control over formatting, may prefer Quadralay's WebWorks ePublisher. But if your primary goal is to create good looking online help with a wealth of features, Flare is hard to beat.
Keith Soltys has been working as a technical writer for 18 years, and is currently at the Toronto Stock Exchange. He maintains the Internet Resources for Technical Communicators web site as well as a weblog. He lives in Pickering with his wife, two children and their cat.