Month: August 2012

Flare to MediaWiki to Flare (part 4, Starting to Map MediaWiki Markup to Flare Topic XML)

Parsing the wiki markup for MediaWiki wikis is a challenge. There is not a markup spec to which to build a parser. But parsers exist. There would be no Wikipedia without one. The original plan for this blog series was to use an existing libary to parse wikitext. That may still be the solution. But… Continue reading Flare to MediaWiki to Flare (part 4, Starting to Map MediaWiki Markup to Flare Topic XML)

Frameborder around Topic Frame in WebHelp

You can’t remove or change the frameborder around the topic frame in WebHelp with the skin editor. At least I haven’t figured out how. Moving to the HTML5 target type eliminates the issue. But in case you aren’t ready for that yet, here is how you can change it post-build with a Visual Basic command… Continue reading Frameborder around Topic Frame in WebHelp

Flare to MediaWiki to Flare (part 3, Placeholder Flare Topics)

In the previous post about this effort, I discussed the MediaWiki API and how to create a Flare TOC from the response from an API call. The same approach is possible for the Flare topics. But since the wiki page content is not maintained as XML, the conversion is more complicated from wiki page to… Continue reading Flare to MediaWiki to Flare (part 3, Placeholder Flare Topics)

Notes about Word and MadCap Flare

This isn’t a code-oriented post. Here are a few thoughts about how to use Word as a part of your Flare infrastructure. When it comes to technical authoring, inevitably, someone will ask if they can use Microsoft Word. And as author’s skills with Word grow, so does their attachment. A desire to structure content, create a… Continue reading Notes about Word and MadCap Flare

Flare to MediaWiki to Flare (part 2, make an API call and a Flare TOC)

To get the wiki pages, something has to make the API calls. A program is needed. I decided to build it rather than look for one that fits. But the plan was to use preexisting libraries to access the MediaWiki API if possible. I also decided to go with a Visual Basic project for this… Continue reading Flare to MediaWiki to Flare (part 2, make an API call and a Flare TOC)

Flare to MediaWiki to Flare (part 1, getting started)

I asked for suggestions for posts on the Users of MadCap Flare on Linkedin. The first one was to see content flow freely between Flare and a wiki. I’m not promising anything. But the suggestion is very good and it is worth a try. I saw some posts on MadCap Software Forums about this. It… Continue reading Flare to MediaWiki to Flare (part 1, getting started)

Batch Files, madbuild.exe, and commands

Flare’s help contains topics about batch targets and there is no need to cover all of that here. Briefly, you can create batch targets for a project. From the Batch Target Editor, you can select actions to take and schedule tasks. To generate output from Flare targets using commands specified outside of the Flare user… Continue reading Batch Files, madbuild.exe, and commands

Use XSLT to create a Flare Topic from XML Data

XSLT is language for transforming XML documents. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0 as recommendation in 1999 and XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 2.0 in 2007. The W3C recommendations are posted at: http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt/ http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/ If you are lucky enough to have information housed as XML, you are just one transformation… Continue reading Use XSLT to create a Flare Topic from XML Data

Regular Expressions and Flare Markup (Danger)

Danger ahead… This post does is not a recommendation to use regular expressions for automation which involves XML and XHTML parsing. Unless you are watching the action or verifying the results later, there are dangers to using regular expressions to parse XML and XHTML. This is discussed extensively on developer forum websites. Computer science curricula which… Continue reading Regular Expressions and Flare Markup (Danger)