Earlier this year, I was invited to write an article for ISTC Communicator, the journal of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators (ISTC). This week, the article was published. Here is a reproduction of the article in its entirety. How MadCap Flare re-ignited my career Daniel Ferguson shares his journey as a technical writer […]
Month: March 2018
Testing External Links with MadCap Analyzer
Linking to external sites from your online help can be very helpful for your users. You can provide them quick access to good or even necessary resources to allow them to complete a task. But external links come with a downside. Over time, URLs change, and you can end up sending your users to non-existent […]
Minifying Flare HTML output files with Grunt
One of my MadWorld 2017 presentations is all about improving the performance of Flare HTML5 outputs. Quick page loads are an important factor in the overall success of your help. Slow page load times leave your users looking for answers to their questions elsewhere. While the overall performance of any website is subject to dozens […]
Using FontAwesome in your MadCap Flare HTML output
FontAwesome has become extremely popular and useful over the last few years. I’m getting more and more questions from clients and others in the Flare community about how to use FontAwesome in MadCap Flare projects. This article helps get you started. What is FontAwesome? FontAwesome is a collection of scalable vector icons and graphics that can […]
Creating multiple print outputs from a single Flare TOC
A few years back, I presented “MadCap Flare for the Total Newbie” as part of MadCap software’s free webinar series. As part of that presentation, I talked about Flare’s multi-channel publishing capabilities, and I gave an example of the way that one of my clients is using multi-channel publishing. In this case, my client is using […]
MadWorld 2017
I am thrilled to once again be speaking at the upcoming MadWorld conference. This will be my third consecutive year as a speaker at this conference, and it always ranks as one of the highlights of my year. Great city, great sessions, great people! I’ll be teaching four sessions this year. Two of them are part […]
Linking to external websites from the Flare TOC
I’ve had a lot of questions recently about Flare TOCs. One of the little-known facts about Flare TOCs is that you can link to external websites from TOC entries. I’ve had more clients ask me this question in the past few months than I had in the previous several years, and I think it’s because […]