Presented by: Denise Kadilak
Madcap Flare harnesses the full power of single-sourcing by allowing you to create multiple outputs such as online, mobile and print. Although a large number of organisations now prefer online outputs, there are still some organisations that need to produce printed outputs due to customer needs or regulatory requirements.
Denise Kadilak walked us through a typical exercise of how to go about creating a printed output.
1. Create content
2. Create styles
3. Create page layouts
4. Create TOC
5. Create Target
Some of the things to consider before creating content, from Denise’s presentation are
a. Identify and condition content based on output needs
b. Plan on what proxies will be used
c. Define appropriate styles
One of the most difficult part of printed outputs is setting up the right page layouts. Denise demonstrated page layouts and how to define page specifications (Margin, orientation, page size). Page layouts are similar to master pages, but slightly more complicated to set up.
According to Denise, master pages are best for automatically adding headers, footers and breadcrumbs in multiple topics. In her presentation, she described what the individual components on a page mean and how they could be used effectively.
- Body frame
- Header frame
- Footer frame
- Decoration frame
- Image frame
Tips picked up from Denise’s presentation:
a. The most underused feature for printed outputs are Table Of Contents.
b. Use standard Madcap templates as a starting point for print outputs and then customise them for your specific needs.
c. Where you have multiple body frames, Flare shows content flow through an directional arrow. You can change the flow of content by changing the arrow direction.
d. Use Mirror page option to create Left and Right pages.
Another cool thing she demonstrated was how her team used multiple TOCs, topics and empty pages to create a professional print output. It is also possible to have landscape layouts within Portrait layouts. The trick is to associate different page layouts to separate topics.
a. Use Master Page Layout on Target if you only have 1 page layout for printed content.
b. Leave it as default if you have set page layouts at TOC level and/or if you have multiple page layouts within your print output.
This was a great session for a lot of the attendees because it precisely showed us how to create professional looking print outputs using Flare.
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