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MadCap Flare file type configuration to recognize FLTOC files

Hi

I've seen a couple of other posts in this area regarding MadCap Flare file support, or the lack of.

Those 2 were:

  • Support for MadCap Flare FLSNP files
  • Support for MadCap Flare FLTAR files

I have another one: support for MadCap Flare FLTOC files. There was at least some attempt to make this work, by specifying the root node required to handle this, but the file wildcard type "*.fltoc" and the XPATH to present translatable content is missing.

It does make me wonder what level of research was performed when producing the MadCap file type parser. Even the most rudimentary review of MadCap Flare would have made it immediately obvious that these 3 file types are fundamental to any MadCap Flare project.

As it stands I have a workaround for the lack of FLTOC support, but it would be great if Trados was shipped with a completed MadCap Flare file type config.

Best Regards

Mark

Mark Owens

  • Hi Paul,

    My take on this is:

    • FLTAR - I have to confess I've not come across a use-case in all my years of using Flare where there is translatable text in a FLTAR file. I'd like to see some example of this.
    • FLSNP - these are fundamental to Flare to enable content re-use. In reality they are HTML files with a FLSNP suffix. The file-type parser simply needs a wildcard entry.
    • FLTOC - the /CatapultTOC/TocEntry/@Title node is the translatable text in these files - I've not seen any other translatable nodes in these file types. Sometimes this node contains literal text, e.g., "About this help" (which would be translatable, and other times it can contain a link to the first body element in the linked topic, typically this would be H1/H2 etc. An example would be: <TocEntry
      Title="[%=System.LinkedTitle%]"
      Link="/Content/A-Introduction-Topics/Whats-New.htm" xmlns:MadCap="">www.madcapsoftware.com/.../MadCap.xsd" />

    Cheers

    Mark

  • I always thought that these three filetypes could be very different as they have project-specific XML structures that vary depending on custom configurations and output needs.  So there may not be one size fits all.  Over the years I have seen many, and they never seem to follow a consistent pattern that would make it straightforward to have a default filetype for.  But they are all pretty simple to create XML filetype for once you have them.  I'm interested to see how the development team see this.