Madcap Flare Keyboard Shortcuts
Tancredo Dori
Many authors work most quickly andefficiently if they can keep their handson the keyboard and do not have tointerrupt their flow by reaching forthe mouse. This means that assigningkeyboard shortcuts to commoncommands can be very beneficial.
Flare has always supportedkeyboards shortcuts to some degree.For example, even in Flare 1 you couldcreate a new topic by pressing Ctrl+T.However, when Flare 11 was released,the support for keyboard shortcuts wastaken to a new level.
Keyboard shortcuts in Flare are nowfully customisable, meaning that youcan add your own chosen shortcutto almost any command, button, oroption within the Flare interface. Youcan also replace the factory defaultkeyboard shortcuts with your ownpreferred key combinations. Finally,it is even possible to set up keyboardshortcuts for assigning specificparagraph and character styles byrecording macros to which you thenassign the keyboard shortcuts.In this article, I will explain how todo all of these things.
To change an existing keyboardassignment for a command, simplyselect the command and then selectthe required Key Assignment andModifiers (Control, Shift, and Alt). Ifthe combination that you select hasalready been assigned to anothercommand, you will be alerted to thisby the command showing in the Othercommands using shortcut field.
Many useful commands do not havekeyboard shortcuts assigned to themby default, and are not shown in thelist of available commands. If youwant to assign a keyboard shortcutto an unlisted command, you cando so by first clicking the UnlistedCommands button.
Before Flare 11, there was only one wayto apply a style by using the keyboard,and that was somewhat convoluted.It involved pressing Ctrl+Shift+H todisplay the floating Style Picker (shownbelow), using an Up or DownArrow key to move to the requiredstyle, and then pressing Enter.
With Flare 11 and above, it is nowpossible to apply a style using a singlekey combination (such as Ctrl+N),though it is not very obvious how to set this up unless you are in the know. Thetrick is to record a macro for the actionof applying the style. You can thenassign a keyboard shortcut to the macro.
Keyboard shortcuts are among the fewsettings in Flare that are not project specific.Since they are defined withinthe global settings available from theOptions button on the File tab, they canbe used for all of the projects that youwork on. The settings are stored in anXML file named Commands_3.mccmds,which is located in the AppData\Roaming\MadCap Software\Flarefolder on your computer.
If you would like to share yourkeyboard shortcuts with other authorsin your team, you can do so by copyingyour version of this file to the samelocation on their computers (overwritingthe version that they alreadyhave). Note that this would result inthose authors losing any keyboardshortcuts of their own that they mighthave already set up.
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This document provides keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, Windows, and special characters. It lists common shortcuts for basic functions like copy, paste, bold, italics. It also includes shortcuts for formatting, navigation, editing and other commands. The shortcuts are organized by application and function for easy reference.Read less
To use XSLT, you need an XSLT processor. If you stick to version 1.0 of the specification, there are lots of choices. But if you want support for the latest version (3.0 at time of writing) your choices are RaptorXML (integrated with Altova's XMLSpy XML editor), or Saxon. Because my preferred XML editor is XMLmind's XML Editor (XXE), I use Saxon. Saxon and XXE both have free editions for personal use and open source projects.
As an aside, I've been using XXE for over a decade. If you have to write docs in an XML format like DocBook or DITA, it's the only editor I would recommend. It has a WYSIWYG interface, keyboard shortcuts for everything and you rarely have to deal with tags.
When you use the processor to apply your XSLT declarations to a file, it creates a new output, leaving the original files unchanged. Although it's a special purpose language, XSLT is Turing-complete, so you can do any kind of computation you might need with it.
Here's an example I created to convert and tags to tags in MadCap Flare. To use it, save it as emphasis.xsl in the path with your files and then from the command line, enter:\
saxon -it:main -xsl:emphasis.xsl.
And here's a slightly more complex example that converts the contents of headings () to sentence case in MadCap Flare. To use it, save it as sentence.xsl in the path with your files and then from the command line, enter:\
saxon -it:main -xsl:sentence.xsl.