November 2008

Problems with Flare 2.0

I've noticed the following bugs in Flare 2.0. Before reading through these, please note that this page is not intended to give an impression of Flare (it would give a very bad impression). It's just a list of problems and irritations with a fairly new piece of software. All new software has problems and irritations, many of which quickly get fixed. Despite the negative nature of this list my overwhelming view of Flare is positive. I could write you a similar list about any of the other authoring tools I use, some of which have been around a great deal longer than Flare and might be expected to have had most of the bugs shaken out of them by now. Flare is a really impressive piece of software. I just wanted somewhere to make a list of all the things that prevent me from saying it's a "great" piece of software. Or to put it another way this list explains why I - although I like using Flare - I can't say I love it. Variables

  1. You can't use variables in topic titles because they don't show up in the TOC or in breadcrumbs.For example, if you have the topic title "Log in to MyProduct", where "MyProduct" is a variable (so that you can easily change it when Marketing change their minds about the product name), this shows up as "Log in to" in the TOC and the breadcrumbs.

TOC problems

  1. You can't select multiple topics and drag them into TOC. You have to add them one by one. It would be much better to be able to Shift-click or Control-click topics in the list of files and drag them into the TOC under a particular "book".
  2. There's no indication in the Content Explorer of which topics are listed in the TOC. It would be better if topics were marked so that you could easily tell that you'd already added them somewhere in the TOC. Even better you'd be able to sort them to move all those that weren't already in the TOC to the top of the Content Explorer list. You could also jump to the first/next entry for a particular topic in the TOC.
  3. You can't drag a topic to the bottom of the TOC list. You have to add it to the TOC, near the bottom, then move the bottom item up above the item you added. The workaround to this is to build your TOC in reverse, from the last "book" to the first.

Structure bars If you've used FrameMaker's Structure View you will find Flare's lame attempt at doing something similar hideously painful to use.

  1. To select an element you can't just click its bar. You have to click it and choose Select from the pop-up menu which alway, always appears.
  2. To delete an element you can't just click its bar and press the Delete key. You have to click it and choose Edit > Delete from the pop-up menu.
  3. Unlike in FrameMaker, Flare does not offer you the flexibility of choosing whether to display no element markers, element markers as simple square brackets, or element markers as tags.
  4. The structure of the document is much, much less easy to see than in FrameMaker, where you can collapse down the structure very quickly and with a large degree of precision (e.g. by shift-clicking to collapse all elements at a certain level). FrameMaker's Structure View is such a clean and apparently simple interface that I didn't appreciate just how effective and well-designed it is until I started using Flare in anger.

Other issues

  1. There are only a few keyboard shortcuts. If you find it seriously slows you down having to reach for the mouse to do something, you'll quickly get irritated that there's no keyboard shortcut for things like inserting a variable. Of course, you can do Alt+i and then V to get the Variables dialog box, but then you need to resort to the mouse anyway to choose the variable from a list. You should be able to do something like Alt+Shift+v and then press 3 then Enter to choose the third variable in the list, or use the up/down cursor keys and Enter. It sounds trivial, but if you're a serious Word or FrameMaker user, you'll be used to doing pretty much everything from the keyboard and Flare's reliance on the mouse will annoy you.