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 ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________
