Madcap and FrameMaker?

[Robert Partridge]

Definitely two different animals. And not direct competitors. They only
compete in that they can be made to produce similar things.

Frame is a print-output based tool for creating highly interconnected
technical documents. It is excellent for this purpose, very scalable and
reliable. It can also be made to produce online help, with certain
issues and difficulties. It was not designed to do this so you need a
third party tool to transform your books to help.

Flare is almost precisely the opposite. It is a true help authoring
tool, designed to create highly interconnected online help systems. It
is excellent for this purpose, very scalable and reliable. However it
can also be made to produce print based documents, with certain issues
and difficulties. It wasn't designed to do this but does include tools
to transform your html files to pdfs. The latest version of Flare has
improved dramatically on this print output process. 

Flare has a learning curve, as do all tools. It's pretty similar in
operation to other help authoring tools, so if you've used XDK or
Robohelp you'll get to grips with it pretty quickly. One drawback is it
uses Visual Studio as a platform, so suffers from the slowness inherent
in that system on large projects. Flare's background comes from the
RoboHelp development team who split off to form Madcap. Like Robohelp
it's prime focus has always been producing online help systems. There is
no formatting text for print output You set up css style sheets for your
online help styles and apply those directly to individual topic help
files. Print output from Flare used to use Word or Framemaker as
intermediate stages as it couldn't address a PDF engine directly. This
has been changed with the latest version where you now set up page
templates within Flare and output directly. No more need for Word or
Frame.

As I've said before, if your main output is print, stick to Frame. I'm
not sure it can be bettered (apart from getting rid of long standing
bugs). It's a tool that doesn't get in your way of writing and producing
content. If you main output is online help, single sourcing to print and
managing the flow of localized versions, I'd try Flare. 

And as for bullets... They are pretty easy in Flare. Apply the bullet to
your list and apply your bullet style. 

I sound like and advert for Flare don't I. For me it's a case of the
right tool for the right job. Online help - use Flare. Print output -
use Frame. Pick your main output and write for that, then use
transformations to get other forms of output if required. If my
deliverables were mostly to print, I'd have no hesitation of using
Framemaker and then probably the excellent MIF2GO to produce online
versions.

Rob


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