Contributor offers an extensive list of features to assist you in reviewing and editing topics from Flare authors. Following are some of the key features that make Contributor unique.
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Workflows
Contributor lets you review and edit topics using four different kinds of workflows.
- Review Workflow (Registered) Using Contributor, you can review and edit documents sent to you by Flare authors. This workflow is for registered users, as opposed to those using the free annotation-only review mode. See Review Workflow.
- Free Review Workflow (Annotation) Using Contributor, you can review documents sent to you by Flare authors. With this workflow, you can add annotations to documents, but you cannot edit them. See Review Workflow.
- Contribution Workflow You can create original content that can be contributed to MadCap Flare projects, printed, or saved in formats such as PDF and XHTML. See Contribution Workflow.
- New Document Workflow You can create and original content that can be printed, or saved in formats such as PDF and XHTML, for purposes other than contributing to a MadCap Flare project. See Creating New Documents.
Annotations
You can work with annotations in the following ways to provide internal comments between users:
- Inserting Annotations
- Editing Annotations
- Hiding and Showing Changes and Annotations
- Deleting Annotations
Tracked Changes
For documents in Contributor, you can track changes and accept or reject those alterations individually. Each change is marked in a color (different colors for different users) and/or labeled in a sidebar. Tracked changes are visible only in the editor in Contributor. They are not visible when viewing any output created from the document (e.g., saving to HTM, XPS, or PDF files).
When this feature is enabled, every change to the document—along with the user who performed the change—will be stored in the document’s markup. For example, deleted text won’t actually be removed from the document, but will instead be marked as deleted in the code. However, if the change is accepted, the text will be removed from the document.
When a Flare author sends you a review package file (FLTREV) and you edit the content files within it, your changes are automatically tracked so that the author can easily see the changes you made. You can not disable the track changes feature for these types of documents.
See Tracked Changes.
Content
Most documents consist of more than just plain text. They can have many types of content, including cross-references, links, images, multimedia, navigation, tables, and more. When you are reviewing a topic or creating a new contribution document, you will often need to add these elements to your documents or edit existing ones. See Content.
Cascading Stylesheets
You can take advantage of cascading stylesheets (CSS files) to control the look of your output in one place.
In addition to using stylesheets for documents, you can use separate stylesheets in Contributor specifically for tables inserted into documents.
File Management
Contributor provides the following features, which can be used to manage your files.
External Resources
One of the ways Contributor supports team collaboration is that you can create mappings to external resources.
The External Resources window pane lets you select and maintain groups of external files that you want to share. The paths of these files are written to the registry.
External resources can be virtually any local or network files to which you have access (e.g., images, PDF files).
The external resources feature is ideal for shared files that you expect to change over time (e.g., logo images, PDFs, stylesheets), as opposed to, say, a template file.
See External Resources.
File Tagging
A file tag can be applied to files for many different purposes, such as assigning authors or milestones to topics.
See File Tagging.
SharePoint Integration
Contributor supports integration with Microsoft SharePoint, including SharePoint Online (or SharePoint 365). From Contributor you can access, edit, and synchronize SharePoint files.
