ITauthor

Paul Pehrson at http://blog.paulpehrson.com has posted a couple of interesting blog entries on Flare:

• Six Reasons to Love Flare
• Six Persistent Flare Problems

I'd agree with the reasons to love Flare, with the exception of what he says about CSS and the XML editor. 

Flare's XML editor

I'm not sure if Paul uses structured FrameMaker but I suspect not because I find it hard to believe anyone who has used FrameMaker's Structure View could think Frame's XML editor anything but seriously flawed. FrameMaker's Structure View is deceptively simple. It works so well, so intuitively, that it's easy not overlook how well conceived it is, until you start using something like Flare's XML editor and you find that:

• you can't multi-select elements
• you can't drag elements anywhere in the structure, just to other places at the same level in the hierarchy and not always then either
• you can't always select elements easily and it's not always clear when you have selected an element
• cutting, pasting and deleting elements is a multi-click operation
• it demands that you use the mouse all the time, so if you're more productive with the keyboard, hard luck
• I could go on ...

Madcap trumpet the XML editor as a feature of Flare, but in reality it's an unfinished feature. It has the feel of something that they got 75% finished and then decided it was good enough, so they moved on to work on other things and never got back to finish the job.

I would give my eye teeth to have FrameMaker's Structure View grafted on to Flare. Because the editor is the place you spend so much of your time, any little drawback, like having to do two extra clicks each time you want to copy or paste an element, in time becomes very wearying - especially when you have a really intuitive interface to compare it with.

On the plus side, I never ever used to use the editor in RoboHelp, preferring to do all my editing in Dreamweaver. With Flare I do use the editor, and it does the job - but like all things you like you want it to be as good as it possibly could be, and the XML editor falls short in some very obvious ways.

Flare's CSS editor

Not much to say on this other than the fact that Flare's interface for editing CSS over-complicates the task of styling up your content. Endless clicking around, scrolling up and down, expanding and contracting sections and searching round for what you need drives you, inevitably, back to the CSS file to edit it in a text editor.

My Flare projects typically have three or four CSS files and by far the easiest way of modifying styles is just to open the files in UltraEdit and edit the text.

When I want to change a font size, or a background colour, I can just type in the new font size or colour, I don't need to fiddle around with the mouse to select the size or colour I want.

I guess it depends what you're looking for, but personally I want to be able to do things quickly and easily. A user interface should facilitate you and help you to be more productive. It shouldn't slow you down, which is what Flare's CSS editor does.

But - to end on a positive note - the good thing about CSS in Flare is that the look of almost everything is driven by CSS, which allows you huge flexibility to determine the appearance of your final output. Apart from a few features of the navigation panes, pretty much everything can be customised to look just the way you want it to look. So if it's important to you to be able to produce something good-looking and different to everyone else's online help, then Flare's definitely worth investigating.