Welcome to Flare

I've jumped onto the MadCap Flare bandwagon. There's sure to be numerous posts about tips for it.

Helpful links:

• MadCap Flare help: http://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare2017r3/Content/Flare/Introduction/Home-Flare.htm
• The MadCap forums: https://forums.madcapsoftware.com
• A helpful Slack group: madcapflareusergroups.slack.com

Modify PDF Metadata, Initial View, and more - for Free!

Do you need to do any of the following tasks in your PDF files:

1. Edit the Title, Author, Subject and Keywords property fields
2. Edit the initial view

How can you accomplish these tasks if you don't have Adobe Acrobat?

Just install Debenu PDF Tools. They have a free version that installs a Windows menu command with these functions and more.

Note that for each change that you make it creates a new PDF with the changes.

[Source: gHacks]

Shades of Gray - Remove Shading

I recently encountered text that had shading on it that was difficult to remove. It looked like this example:

FYI: The text above was generated with the lorem shortcut.

It tried to remove it using the Text Highlight Color tool, but it didn't remove it.

Then I tried to remove it with the Borders tool. I clicked Borders > Borders and Shading > Shading, then changed the Fill to No Color. Clicked OK, and nothing happened.

The trick to fixing it is to apply the shading to the text, not the paragraph. Change Apply to in the dialog to Text.

Click OK, and the shading goes away:

Ugly Lines in PDFs

You might have ugly lines in your PDFs, such as these:

The outline on 3 sides of the Note style are 1/2 point, so they should be nice and thin. (Note that the left side is thick by design.) Unfortunately, Adobe makes the lines look strange, and even different at each level of zoom.

But, have no fear - Adobe Acrobat Reader has a preference to enhance these lines that actually makes it pretty ugly. And you can turn it off!

To disable the setting:

1. Select Edit > Preferences
2. Select Page Display
   
3. Unselect the Enhance thin lines setting
4. Click OK

Your output should now look more like this image:

[Source: Microsoft]

Kill Them All! - From the Command Line

If you ever wanted to kill a process from the command line, there's an easy way to do it.

First, show what processes are running using the tasklist command:

C:>tasklist

Second, use Taskkill to kill it by process name or process ID:

C:>Taskkill /IM firefox.exe /F

C:>Taskkill /PID 26356 /F

The /F flag forces the process to quit.

[Source: Tweaks]