What is Flare?

- [Voiceover] Welcome. In this video, you'll learn what Flare is, and what kinds of documents you can use it to create. Flare is a content authoring tool that lets you create a variety of documents including online help for software applications, the kind of help that users get by clicking a Help button, online documents like service manuals, reference manuals, and training manuals, and print versions of those same service manuals, reference manuals and training manuals, and more, and other types of material that you might need in both online and print form.

You'll create these outputs by creating content in small chunks called Topics, adding navigation in the form of a table of contents, a Search feature, maybe an index, various kinds of web style links, formatting and more. The output is typically read on a desktop PC or laptop, but Flare also lets you create online outputs to be read on mobile device, like phones or tablets. You can also use a technology called responsive output to create one output that can be read on all these types of devices.

Print output is typically in the form of a PDF, Word or FrameMaker document. Traditionally, you'd create a separate project for each of these outputs, but Flare lets you create one project from which you can generate all of these outputs. You'll do this using a technique called Single Sourcing. Single Sourcing lets you work more efficiently because you're creating multiple outputs from one source of material, rather than multiple sources for each output.

This also simplifies maintenance, because there's only one copy of the material to maintain. So, in this video, you'll learn what Flare is, and what you can use it to create.