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Dear Christine,
Thanks for sharing your experience with Flare :-).
I agree that one of the main differences between Flare
and Author-it (AIT) is the use of a database in AIT.
As you mention, the complexity, degree of reuse, and
scope of projects are considerations when choosing a
tool. For us, it seems that AIT will help support our
projects best because we have numerous audiences and
numerous kinds of publications.
I have used conditional text and did find it useful
when reuse was limited as you point out. But when the
degree of reuse increased, I found keeping lots of
conditional text for various audiences & purposes
within one topic unwieldy.
I find it easier to see separate deliverables at a
glance in separate TOC formats ? that is, one TOC for
audience A?s training materials, one TOC for audience
A?s online help, one TOC for audience B?s training
materials, and so on. Content that is shared among
these audiences and TOCs can easily get updated in the
shared topics and gets propagated automatically to
wherever those shared topics are used; you don?t have
to go into each TOC to make the update.
One thing I am curious about ? does Flare support the
sharing of topics among multiple authors?
In Author-it you can place a shared topic or a section
of a topic on a shared directory for other authors to
reuse.
Also, how are the snippets in Flare saved?
If I remember correctly, the snippets are saved in a
kind of list format ?- is it possible to customize the
way you organize snippets? (For example, can you set
up a folder to keep all snippets for audience A in one
place, another folder for audience B snippets, and so
on?)
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