Matthew Ellison provided a beginner’s guide to using Flare with source control. Source control provides you with a\u00a0central repository containing a copy of your project, with all previous versions of all project files. Files are copied from source control to a local workspace for working on, and your changes are copied back from the local workspace to the source control. Some of the source control features are buried within Flare, and Matthew pointed out a number of capabilities\u00a0in Flare that could be easily missed.<\/p>\n

Don’t Take That Tone With Me!<\/h2>\n

Actually, this was my second presentation at the conference. We\u00a0looked at examples of companies that have adopted a friendlier, conversational tone, including exploring how Microsoft\u00ae\u2019s “No More Robot Speak” program has been implemented in the online Help for its Office and Windows products. I explained\u00a0the reasons for this change, the techniques used, and the implications of this on the technical writing and localization teams. The audience was very engaged, and I found there was a lot of interest in this subject.<\/p>\n

Extending HTML5 Targets with jQuery<\/h2>\n

Scott DeLoach got a lot of oohs and aahs from the audience, as he demonstrated a number of jQuery plugins that can extend the functionality of HTML5 pages.\u00a0jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library that makes it much simpler to include JavaScript code into web pages. He\u00a0demonstrated three plugins of his own (dropDownTogglerTextSwap, showHideConditions and SearchAutocomplete), plus some developed by\u00a0the wider web\u00a0community. These included plugins for:<\/p>\n

\n
• Adding drop captions to images<\/li>\n
• Generating PDFs on the fly<\/li>\n
• Adding annotations to a web page<\/li>\n
• Sticking the top menu\u00a0to the top of the browser window while scrolling past it, so it is always kept in view<\/li>\n
• Making sure\u00a0new content was\u00a0highlighted to\u00a0users, whenever they visited a page. This plugin tracked a user\u2019s actions without requiring login, authentication or any server-side processing. This would be useful where you needed to make users were aware of any changes to policies and procedures since they last visited a page.<\/li>\n
• Formatting code samples<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

  Madbuild Bliss: A Case Study in MadCap Flare Build Automation<\/h2>\n

  Andrei Essaoulov provided a review of MadCap Flare\u2019s automation capabilities. These included creating batches for publishing, scheduling automatic publishing, setting up publishing destinations, and the Madbuild command line utility. Madbuild is a utility\u00a0that many users don’t seem to know. It means you can publish content automatically – you don’t need to have Flare running.<\/p>\n

  Andrei went into more detail about the Jenkins builds and PowerShell scripts kCura uses to publish automatically.\u00a0Automating the documentation build and integrating it with the teams processes enabled them\u00a0to deliver up-to-date content more efficiently and improve the overall quality of documentation content.<\/p>\n

  Summary<\/h2>\n

  The presentations highlighted how a little knowledge of JavaScript and CSS can mean you can extend the functionality of Flare’s HTML5 content in a lot of interesting ways. Not only can you now create powerful HTML5 pages, you can also use Flare to generate PDF, slide, ebook and Word variations of the same content as well. Add in the localization capabilities of MadCap Lingo, MadCap Contributor, plus the upcoming MadCap Central, and you have a powerful set of tools for publishing content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Last week, I spoke at, and attended, Madworld 2016, the conference hosted by MadCap Software for its users.\u00a0Here is a summary of what I saw and heard on the second\u00a0day. These were mostly for advanced users; I didn’t see any of the presentations aimed at new users of Flare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[172,150,151,145],"tags":[383,605,669,532,262],"class_list":["post-11729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences","category-flare","category-madcap","category-technical-author","tag-conference","tag-flare-2","tag-javascript","tag-madworld","tag-technical-communication"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n