Is Madcap Flare just the least annoying authoring tool?

I'd really like to be able to say that Flare is a single-source solution that allows you to produce great online help and great printed manuals from the same source documents. Unfortunately it just isn't true. That Holy Grail of tech authoring still seems just out of reach.

Flare gets pretty close to allowing you to single source, but it still has the following major issues that prevent you from outputting PDFs (via integration with FrameMaker).

1. PDF bookmarks

   There's no effective way of controlling what becomes a bookmark in you PDF. When I output direct to PDF I get some bizarre results. This precludes being able to issue the PDF to a customer. I have to output to FrameMaker, specify the bookmarks and then output the PDF myself. This might not seem too much of a hassle, but the fact is that it means Flare just isn't doing what it claims to be able to do. What I want to be able to do is make a quick change in Flare and output the PDF without having to do anything in FrameMaker at all. At the moment this just isn't possible.

   For those of you debating the value of taking out a Support contract with Madcap, you might be interested to know that this is an issue I queried with Madcap a couple of months back and I still haven't had any word on a resolution of this issue. Is a fix going into the next release. Who knows?

2. Cross-references to another part of the same chapter

   The problem here is that if you have a multi-chapter document, and you create a cross-reference to somewhere in another chapter, it works fine - but if the cross-reference goes to somewhere in the same chapter, the link does not work.

   The reason for the problem is identified in this forum correspondence:

   http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?p=18143#18143

   There are two solutions (both ugly):

   a) Output the chapters to MIF, edit the MIF, remove the XRefSrcFile value for the broken links, save the MIF file to FrameMaker format again and generate the PDF.

   b) Search for broken cross-references in FrameMaker, edit the cross-reference, specify the correct marker that it should be pointing to, save the file and generate the PDF.

   Both of these are time-consuming and, again, you need to do this each and every time you make any change to your source files. So, say a button name changes and you need to change a single topic file, this means this one-word change could take you half a day to implement and produce the corrected PDF. That's unacceptable.

3. Hyphenation

   Flare always turns hyphenation on. There's no way of specifying, in the CSS within Flare, whether you want hyphenation or not. So all paragraphs get hyphenation, even when they're unjustified.

   Even headings get hyphenated, which just looks ridiculous.

   And because FrameMaker isn't very smart about hyphenation - that is, it doesn't adjust the word and character spacing in a line in order to avoid hyphenation where possible - it means you get a lot of hyphenation, some of it incredibly clumsy.

   Again, this is something I queried with Madcap weeks ago, under my Support contract, and, despite going back to ask them what's happening, have heard nothing to give me hope that this will be fixed soon.

Conclusion

All of this is very disappointing. As I've said before, I'm a fan of Madcap and I'd like them to do well, but all evidence from them lately leads me to believe they're too busy rushing forwards to the next thing, and trying to stick to their masterplan of producing an Adobe-beating authoring suite, to spend time getting their products to work correctly.

Sadly, this is the same old story we had from eHelp of old. A basically good product, but with lots of really annoying issues for which we, the users, had to work out tortuous workarounds. Would I recommend people buy Flare? Yes, I would and I do. However, I always have to tell them that this is a new product and it still has several very annoying new-product issues.

The trouble is Flare is no longer a new product. It leaves me wondering: how long before I have to stop forgiving Flare on the grounds of being a new product and recommend it - if indeed I do continue to recommend it - on the grounds that it's the least annoying authoring tool available right now.