MadCap Flare for Programmers: A guide to getting the most from Flare
by Thomas Tregner and David Owens.
$35.95 (print), $24.95 (ebook).
MadCap Flare for Programmers: A guide to getting the most from Flare shows how MadCap Flare manages and parses content and how you can interact with Flare outside the user interface. It introduces the structure of Flare content files and Flare output files, such as HTML5 help, and shows how you can manipulate those files.
With more than 50 examples in languages such as JavaScript, C#, Java, XSLT, and Visual Basic, this book covers most of the ways you can programmatically interact with MadCap Flare.
Inside the Book
- Foreword by Anthony Olivier, CEO of MadCap Software
- Introduction
- Flare Projects
- Flare, Topic-based Authoring, and DITA
- Flare Topics
- Flare Tables of Contents
- Flare Indexes, Glossaries, and Search
- JavaScript in Flare Topics, Master Pages, Snippets, and Skins
- Document Automation and Batch Files
- Connecting Applications to Flare Help Outputs
- Flare Application and Flare Plugins
- Formatting and Pasting Code Samples into Flare
- Strategies for Combining Generated and Authored Content
- Appendix A: Batch File Generator Utility
- Appendix B: Element List
- Appendix C: Glossary
- Index
About the Authors
Thomas Tregner
Thomas Tregner was raised in Villa Park, Illinois. A secondhand Commodore 64 and some encouragement from his father gave him his first exposure to programming. After graduating from high school, Thomas worked at various jobs and took college courses before enlisting in the US Navy. He graduated from the Navy Nuclear Power Program and served on USS Enterprise.
After his time in the Navy, Thomas worked as a technical writer while finishing a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems. He then transitioned to programming. He is currently a software engineer at a publicly held software company in Charleston. Thomas also holds a Master of Science in Computer Information Systems from Nova Southeastern University. He has a blog about this book’s subject matter at www.tregner.com.
Thomas and his wife, Laura, live Charleston, South Carolina, with their three children.
David Owens
David Owens is Group Manager of User Education at Blackbaud, the leading provider of software and services for nonprofit organizations. As Group Manager, David leads several distributed feature documentation teams and an SDK documentation and training team. The group includes technical writers, information architects, and software developers who create content that blends traditional and non-traditional user assistance formats. His teams have been using MadCap Flare as their primary authoring tool since 2011.
As a technical writer and information developer, David has created feature and API user assistance content in a wide variety of formats for software products ranging from an enterprise fundraising CRM application and a business intelligence multidimensional data analysis system, to shrinkwrapped mass market software, as well as commercial hardware. David has published articles on topics such as single-sourcing and how to become a technical
technical writer. He also contributed a section to Troubleshooting Microsoft Technologies: The Ultimate Administrator’s Repair Manual published by Addison-Wesley.
What are They Saying?
“This book offers the most thorough overview of advanced Flare development available to date.”
— Anthony Olivier, CEO of MadCap Software, From the Foreword