One day, we converted one of our many large Word files, and I noticed something funny about a bulleted list. It seemed that the last bullet in the list was missing. I checked the Word file and the text should have been there. It just wasn’t.

After some investigation, it seemed that we discovered a bug in Flare. If you had a bulleted list, and the last bullet in that list had an endnote/footnote in it, Flare deleted the bullet.

So, I emailed our contact at Madcap (sales guy) and explained the situation. He nearly flipped. This is a significant bug, and no one else had seen it before. So, he took it to the VP of Development, and they made the issue a priority. Within a week, we had a patch that saved our project.

During that week in limbo, I took the time to look at other tools. WebWorks ePublisher (which I had not used since 2001) is what I would consider to be the cadillac of these tools. It is easier to use, and works a lot better than Flare or RoboHelp or Doc2Help, and I admit I was close to buying it. However, Flare saved the day so I’m not really in the market for a new tool at this point. If that changes, and we need another tool in the future, I’ll be seriously looking at WebWorks.