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We had a large DITA project (large for us...thousands of topics and about 700-800 pages for a compiled PDF). Using DITA, it could take 15 minutes to over an hour, depending on how you were accessing the files, to generate a PDF. Converted to Flare (saved on software costs, server costs, etc.). There were some pain points in that Flare didn't convert to Word as easily as PDFs (which we discovered), and getting the skins and style sheets set up wasn't the easiest.
However, Madcap's support was terrific! They helped resolve all of our issues. It now takes 3-4 minutes to generate our documents (we don't have a lot of graphics, but do have a number of customizations depending on the audience). It has been great. Took about 6-8 weeks to get the template working with our imported topics, but has been running quickly ever since. Quite a bit of time was spent trying to figure things out on our own. Madcap really came through for us.
The nice thing is that we got the Word version working (for SMEs to review) and can generate an online help version in the future.
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+bgilber=transunion -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+bgilber=transunion -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf Of Janoff, Steven
Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 2:59 PM
To: Andrew Harvie <withanie -at- gmail -dot- com>; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: RE: Large Flare projects (2,000+ pages)
Wow, there are some huge projects out there!
Appreciate hearing about both of these.
We solved our problem just today, by chance.
Turns out it's a non-problem. We had been searching too high in the folder hierarchy (entire project folder).
When we confined our search to the Content folder under the project folder, we came up with virtually no hits (for the bad stuff).
Amazing.
So I guess Flare is okay with large projects as long as you know what's going on and where everything is. My recollection with the big DITA systems is that they take care of most of that for you. Although, I've seen errors made there too.
Thanks for the inputs and if there are more stories, I'd love to hear them. Amazing to hear some of the scale.
Steve
On Wednesday, August 12, 2015 6:44 AM, Andrew Harvie wrote:
My Flare project comes to over 4000 pages if printed. Yes, I do break it up into several manuals if generating as PDF. None of our customers want that as a single document.
But recently, just for the fun of it, I did succeed in generating a single PDF of the whole danged thing. The trick is to boot into Windows safe mode first. Then go for lunch. I learned that trick in the Madcap forums two years ago.
On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 7:23 AM, Matt Danda <mdanda -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
> One of my Flare projects results in a 3,000+ page PDF. I've broken it
> down into about 20 or so individual PDFs (across 2 separate Flare
> projects) and then I combine the PDFs manually using Acrobat Pro. I
> tried to make a single, massive TOC once but that failed to generate,
> so now I just generate the smaller documents. It takes several hours
> to produce the final output, given all the steps required to assemble
> the PDFs, but it is a million times better than Word, which took weeks
> (literally) to accomplish the same task. -Matt Danda
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