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FrameMaker's WYSIWYG display very closely matches PDF output. Dealing
with PDF page breaks is a pain with Flare (as it is with Confluence,
and probably with every other authoring tool that doesn't have a
page-oriented WYSIWYG editor).
FrameMaker can export change markup to comment-enabled PDF for review
by people who don't have FrameMaker.
WebWorks' web help looks better out of the box and is the easiest to
customize of any authoring tool I've used.
WebWorks support was very responsive and solved all my problems. (Most
of my support calls to both Adobe and MadCap ended with bug reports or
feature requests or them telling me it was a known bug. MadCap fixed
some of my problems in the course of the year I was using Flare but
the worst weren't fixed until I'd gone on to the next job.)
When doing major updates or revisions I find it much more efficient to
have all the content in one big file instead of one file per topic or
few topics. Flare's granularity in that regard is my least favorite
thing about it. If you're going to make me go to all that trouble, why
not use a non-proprietary source format so I can mix and match tools?
The search in Flare's web help is weak.
The one big plus for me with Flare was having the source in XHTML. On
the other hand, way too often I had to edit the XHTML to fix
formatting problems that didn't respond to GUI commands. (I have the
same kinds of problems with Confluence, by the way.)
On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Shawn C <shawn -at- convergent -dot- io> wrote:
>>Flare's usable but given free choice I'd use FrameMaker plus WebWorks.
>
> I'm curious Robert about your response. Why do you feel that FrameMaker and
> WebWorks are a better choice for you.
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