In my Flare Basic/Intermediate classes, students frequently ask specific questions about creating print output. Time constraints don’t always allow me to discuss the subject in detail, so I give a concise process overview in class and answer individual questions outside of class hours.
In upcoming articles I will share guidelines, suggestions, and tips for using Flare to create attractive, professional-looking print output. My advice comes from MadCap’s recommendations and my own experimentation. I welcome reader comments and perspectives.
As of this writing, the latest version of Flare is 4.0. If you used earlier versions, you already know that Flare is capable of sophisticated print publishing. In those versions you used a master page template to design a page layout. You specified a Word or FrameMaker target. If you needed PDF output, you generated it from Word or Frame.
Flare 4 significantly enhances the print publishing process. Here are some highlights:
- New targets: Flare now includes PDF and XPS targets. You no longer need Word or FrameMaker as part of your print workflow, but you can still create targets for both.
- Dedicated page layout templates designed for print documents: Although you can still use master pages to design layouts for online and print output, you now have a better alternative for print. Page layouts are design templates that can handle anything from simple, one-sided documents to complex, double-sided books. Here’s what MadCap says about page layouts:
You can use page layouts to configure pages for print-based output (e.g., page size, orientation, headers, footers, page numbers). Page layouts allow for easy configuration through the use of content frames, a snap-to-grid, dragging and dropping, alignment features, and more.
You can continue to use master pages for online content, but page layouts are far superior for printed pages.
- Print layout view: While writing or editing a topic in the Flare XML Editor, you can now view the topic in a WYSIWYG mode that shows how the content will look in printed output. This view looks similar to a Word or Frame document, where you can distinguish the page borders and margins.
- Context-sensitive cross-references: Flare already has outstanding support for cross-referencing, but this new enhancement creates a cross-reference format that dynamically changes based on its location in the document. For example, as you add and remove pages and the content moves, the cross-reference might read above, below, on the next page, on the previous page, or on the facing page.
- Footnotes: You can now insert footnotes in printed documents and control their appearance with styles.
This is by no means a complete list. Flare has many other useful print features, which I will discuss in future articles. Meanwhile, you can find a full list of new features in the Flare WebHelp, including the print features that I have not listed here. Search using the words What’s new.
