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On Friday, September 26, 2014 5:33 PM, Robert Lauriston wrote:
Flare is fundamentally similar to RoboHelp HTML, which is intentional, since Flare was conceived as an upgrade path for RoboHelp users.
Macromedia bought eHelp to get RoboDemo, put RoboHelp on the shelf, and laid off most or all of the RoboHelp developers, some of whom started MadCap. Adobe later bought Macromedia and brought RoboHelp back from the dead. RoboDemo became Captivate.
Flare topic source is XHTML, which is just a strict subset of HTML.
Topics are organized by TOCs, which Flare's text processing system transforms into PDF or web help or whatever, with transforms specified by CSS and various options in the "target" definitions.
On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Janoff, Steven <Steven -dot- Janoff -at- hologic -dot- com> wrote:
> Thanks, Robert, this is good. Let me think about that. I think the two aspects you distinguish are both important (the database part and the unstructured part).
>
> Steve
>
> On Friday, September 26, 2014 4:24 PM, Robert Lauriston wrote:
>
> When they say, "A Flat File structure â There is no hidden database,"
> they don't mean a structure of flat files, they mean a flat structure of files, that is, topics are just a pool of files in a directory.
> That is the definition in this context.
>
> When they say the benefit of that is "Flare projects can be stored locally on your PC or they can be stored on a network drive without fear of database corruption that plagues tools with older architectures," they're talking about RoboHelp, which indeed has a hidden database.
>
> Flare topic files are XHTML. They're unstructured in the DITA sense.
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