Hold off on the MIF

In my previous post I described how Flare wasn't handling output to FrameMaker well and I was going to have to insert an intermediary stage, outputting the FrameMaker files produced by Flare as MIF files, running a tidy-up script on these, opening the MIF files in FrameMaker again and then outputting to PDF. Well probably not. Hallelujah!

It looks like the mistake I was making was that I'd built my Flare project with WebHelp in mind and was then trying to output this to FrameMaker and use a FrameMaker template, within FrameMaker, to apply styling - i.e. to redo the formatting done by Frame so that the finished document looks like the documents we produce natively in FrameMaker. This seemed to have a certain logic, but it's not the way MadCap expect you to do it.

The way to do it is just to think of FrameMaker as your pagination engine and to aim to do nothing in FrameMaker. So you have to do all the formatting for printed output within Flare. This still seems weird to me, when Flare is so obviously designed as an online user assistance authoring tool, not a printed output tool. And if you've already got a FrameMaker template that'd do the job, it's extra work to have to do all the CSS work and master page setup within Flare. But I guess it's an overhead that'll pay off - if it all works.

The thing that hindered me and meant I took a long time reaching this Newton's Apple moment was that Flare's own online help doesn't explain the process well. Support for FrameMaker output didn't come with the initial Flare release and although the help has some topics dealing with this subject, it really needs a whole section to itself, leading you through the process, with an overview, perhaps some diagrams, maybe even a screencast, and then all the procedural topics that show you how to get it all working. At the moment the topics that are in there are difficult to digest because they aim to cover Word and FrameMaker, and they don't take you lead you through it. Most of the detail seems to be there, but there's very little in the way of overview, conceptual explanation and methodology.

Anyhow, apologies to MadCap for suggesting that output to FrameMaker didn't work. It just doesn't work in the way that I (and maybe you) expected.

Now I've got to go away, reassess where I am on this project, and see if I have time to fix the printed output properly using a beefed up for-print-only CSS file. But I'm feeling much more optimistic that I can get this to work now. And, as an unofficial Flare evangelist, I can go back to telling people how good Flare is, and score one more quibble off the list. Now it they'd just finish off the editor properly ...

Finally, I got an email from a Technical Support Analyst at MadCap asking about my last post and offering to try and help me out. Now I enjoy having a Support contract with MadCap, which has proved its worth in the past, but this time I hadn't actually asked for help, so I've got to take my cap off (sorry, bad pun) to MadCap that they'd go out of their way to offer to help. In all the years I've been blogging about FrameMaker I've never once had an email from Adobe.