Madcap Flare vs Framemaker

[Keith Soltys]

I used Flare for about six months before moving back to FrameMaker and WebWorks ePublisher.

I found that Flare was overly complex and hard to write in and took a lot more tweaking than MadCap's promotional videos would lead you to believe. Web-based output was good and fairly easy to set up but PDF output was not nearly as good as FrameMaker's.

If you are used to working in Word, take a look at WebWorks ePublisher. I think most Word users would find the transition to FrameMaker easier than the transition to Flare and with WebWorks you can use both Word and FrameMaker files to generate help.

Regards
Keith



> -----Original Message-----
> From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-
> bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of laura at lavadome.net
> Sent: Monday, December 17, 2012 3:43 AM
> To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
> Subject: Madcap Flare vs Framemaker
>
>  Hi all
>
>  We are a small tech pubs department (2 of us) who currently use Word  for our
> documentation. We mainly publish to PDF, but use RoboHelp for a  very small
> help system. Ideally we’d like to use single-sourcing as much  as possible moving
> forward, and add more online help to our  documentation suite.
>
>  We are looking to move away from Word to a tool better suited for  technical
> publications. At the moment we are considering MadCap Flare or  Adobe
> FrameMaker.
>  We’ve done a general search for pros and cons of both (we have used  Frame
> extensively in the past), and have installed the latest versions  of both. We are
> interested in hearing if any other writers have  experiences that might help us
> make the right choice!
>
>  If anyone has used Flare and gone back to Frame, or has any other  insights that
> might help us, please do get in touch.
>
>  Many thanks
>  Laura
>

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