Building and Publishing the Primary Target

Use the following steps if you want to quickly build and publish the primary target for your project.

What is a Primary Target?

A target is a file that generates output from your project. You want your output to look and behave in a certain way, but not all authors have the same audience or work for the same company with the same needs and the same computer networking setup. Therefore, Flare lets you choose the best type of output(s) for your needs. A target file is used for each instance of an output type. And you can have many targets in your project (e.g., eight targets using PDF, two targets using HTML5). See Determining the Output Type and Step 4: Developing Targets.

So what is the big deal with the primary target? It is simply about convenience. Although you can use more than one target for your project—you will most likely use just one target most of the time. So Flare lets you designate one target as your primary target and gives you shortcuts to perform certain tasks with it, including building the output from the primary target.

How to Build and Publish the Primary Target

  1. (Optional) If you plan to use the publishing destination feature to automatically copy your generated output files to a specific location, make sure you have already created the destination file and associated it with your target. See Creating Destinations and Associating Destination Files With Targets.
  2. Do one of the following, depending on the part of the user interface you are using:
    • Ribbon Select Project > Build Primary (to build only) or Project > Publish Primary (to publish a target that has already been generated).
    • Local Toolbar Open the target. In the local toolbar of the Target Editor click (to build only) or (to publish a target that has already been generated).
    • Keyboard Shortcut Press F6 (to build only) or CTRL+F6 (to publish a target that has already been generated).
  3. (Optional) A row is added to the Builds window pane, showing the progress of the target as it is generated and/or published. If the target generates or publishes successfully, the color of the Progress column changes from light to dark green, and the State column displays "Publish Complete" (if you published). You can then double-click that row or select it and click View Output.
  4. (Optional) The log file is generated and saved automatically at the location you specified on the Build tab of the Options dialog (File > Options). The default location is the root level of the output folder for that target. You can tell if errors or warnings have occurred by looking at the appropriate columns in the Builds window pane. You can then select that row and in the local toolbar click Open Build Log. See Opening Build Logs.

Warning If your computer's anti-virus (AV) software scans the Output folder during the build process and you experience one or more "Build Failed" errors, the AV software may be preventing the build process from accessing the output files. To avoid this, you can temporarily turn off or disable your AV scan. You may also be able to exclude the Output folder, add Flare to an exceptions list, or postpone/reschedule scans to a different time. See your AV vendor for information.

Note You can also select the target row in the Builds window pane and click Rebuild Target to generate the output again.

Note As an alternative to using Flare's publishing destination feature, you can click on a generated row in the Builds window pane and select Open Output Folder. Then navigate to the target folder and copy the output files wherever you need them. See Step 5: Building and Publishing Output.

Note If you have added linked projects to your target to create multilingual output, Flare will build each project in the order you specified in the Target Editor. See How to Select Languages for a Target.

What’s Next?

After you build your primary target, you can do the following.