MadCap Blaze

[Sharon Burton]

****Vendor post****

Forgive me - these are straight questions. I really don't quite understand.

What's convoluted about getting printed output out of XML, HTML, or 
XHTML topics
in Blaze?

You create topics, you define and assign style sheets to topics (you can also
have multiple style sheets in one project and assign them at build time when
you create the output), you create outlines that define the content for the
output, you specify PDF, XPS, or HTML as the output, you output, and you're
done.

What other printed outputs would you want? PDF and XPS seem to be the 
only ones
you can send to a printer for printed books... If your workflow needs you to
also output to Word or Frame, we have that too, but it's not really a print
output, per se.

As to XML, HTML, or XHTML not being the right data format for content, 
it's the
direction the industry is moving. Data in these formats are more 
extendable and
reusable than in a Word format, for example... Pretty much all CMSs, for
example, store data as one of these formats.

We've not found much that you can do in unstructured Frame that you 
can't do in
Blaze. But Blaze does things that Frame can't do, like Smart Cross-references.
[see the docs or our website for what those are but they are very powerful]

As to the docs, we have a 36 page Quick Start Guide and very extensive help
system in the first beta build. This *is* a beta, so we're finishing the docs
during the beta, hopefully using info you guys give us about what else needs
tight docs. We would need to know what are you struggling with that needs more
docs?

Can you help me understand?

Quoting quills at airmail.net:

>
> For a product that is supposedly Print oriented, HTML is a lousy
> media to produce it in. There is no reason to use HTML. Even XHTML is
> not the best route, nor is XML. While HTML and XHTML are presentation
> based, they don't allow the same type of easy manipulation that
> FrameMaker or even Word allows.
>
> This just isn't a paradigm that makes sense to me. There isn't an
> output other than html or PDF or XPS. The means to get to your output
> result is laborious and convoluted. This just doesn't seem to be a
> well thought out print solution.
>
> And the beta did not provide me with any real documentation that I
> could view with confidence. Was that a problem with the build?
>
> Scott