I’m about to go off on a rant. I work as a tech writer and I have a love-hate relationship with MadCap Flare, my authoring tool of choice. On one hand, it has simplified my work immensely by making it easy to create professional-quality documents in a variety of format from a single source. In that respect, Flare is head-and-shoulders above its competitors. On the other hand, every day I have to struggle with Flare’s bizarre, non-standard WYSIWYG editor. Honestly, simple editing tasks are brutally painful.

Text editors, including WYSIWYG editors, have over the decades evolved certain standards for common tasks, including word selection, keyboard navigation, cut-and-paste operations, and all variety of basic word processing activities. That’s why when you move from one text editor to another, it’s relatively easy to become productive quickly — after all, you’re already familiar these standards. As a writer, these navigation keystrokes are second nature to you.

What was the reasoning, then, that made the designers at MadCap decide to throw those standards out the window and make up their own? Let me give you a few examples of their bizarre design choices.

• The Home key should move the cursor to the beginning of the line, right? Not in Flare. It goes to the beginning of the paragraph. Similarly, the End key moves the cursor to the end of the paragraph and not the line.
• You might expect the down arrow to move the cursor one line down in the same horizontal position, but you would be wrong. In Flare, the cursor moves one line down and several characters to the right, inexplicably. I’m hoping that this one is just a bug that will be fixed in a future release.
• Your cursor can end up between lines, and pressing delete once will wipe out the entire next paragraph. I’m trying and failing to figure out how that could be useful enough to warrant the risk of accidentally deleting something without noticing it had happened.
• Selecting text is great fun too. You can’t easily select to the end of a line due to the End key’s behaviour, so you have to Shift+Ctrl+right-arrow word by word. That, or click-drag with your mouse.
• The previous point is especially fun when editing long sections of “PRE” tagged computer code snippets, in which line breaks are used in instead of paragraph tags. Press End at any point, and it takes you to the end of the section of code. And you can’t easily insert tabs or indents for code that uses different levels of indentation, which is most code. Essentially, if you want to include any code examples in your document, you have to edit it in a text editor separately and then paste it into Flare. Carefully.
• There’s something odd about the cursor’s behaviour around inline tags, like style and condition tags, where the insertion point becomes a left or right bracket without moving. That’s probably mentioned in their help, I guess.
• If you select some paragraphs then click Bullet List, Flare will not only bullet the selected paragraphs, but the one after too.

I could list more oddities, but I think my rant is running out of steam now. Whew.

Incidentally, writing this blog entry was really quite easy because I didn’t need to use Flare. The WordPress editor actually uses standard keystrokes.

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