Get Started

As a new Flare Desktop user, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with some basic information.

There are hundreds of features in Flare Desktop. But you don’t need to try to use all (or even many) of them. Become acquainted with the most important concepts and Flare Desktop’s key features to discover which ones might be particularly important to you.

Flare Desktop's workspace is flexible, uses a modern Multiple Document Interface (MDI), and gives you several options to work the way that you want. Get to know some of the more important parts of the workspace.

Before starting your first project, you might want to explore ideas for developing your project architecture. You should think about what’s important for your goals, consider the features that will best support your efforts, and come up with a structural design. Some of the information provided here might be beyond a brand new user, but it is still a good idea to review it to help you make important decisions up front rather than making extensive changes later.

When you break down the authoring process in Flare Desktop, you will discover that it can be quite simple. Following are the basic steps that you need to follow for creating and developing a project in Flare Desktop. Although Flare users sometimes need to produce completely different kinds of output from one another (e.g., a technical writer might need a quite large Help system, whereas an eLearning professional could just need some short training courses), the same basic five steps are necessary for everyone.

  1. Start Projects Create a project from scratch, or start a project by importing existing content from a variety of sources.

  2. Author Add content and features, such as topics, text, a table of contents, cross-references, navigation, page layouts, and all of the other elements necessary to help your end users.
  3. Design Through the use of features such as stylesheets, skins, page layouts, template pages, and more, you can design a look and feel for your output.
  4. Develop Targets Decide the type(s) of output formats that you want to generate and develop targets accordingly to meet your needs.
  5. Build and Distribute Output Generate output from a target, then make the files accessible to your end users.