MadCap Software, the provider of multi-channel content authoring and a showcase company for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft XPS, announced the debut of MadCap Analyzer, the first software to proactively suggest document development improvements. MadCap Analyzer works with MadCap Flare, the company's flagship native-XML authoring product, and MadCap Blaze, the native-XML alternative to Adobe FrameMaker for publishing long print documents, which will be generally available in early 2008.

    MadCap Analyzer also provides the most comprehensive project reporting in the technical documentation industry, delivering more than twice the functionality of any competing solution. MadCap Analyzer is being announced today in conjunction with MadCap Lingo, an XML-based, fully integrated translation memory system and authoring tool, which eliminates the need for file transfers. Based on native XML and offering full Unicode support, MadCap's software uniquely addresses the documentation requirements of today's global, Internet-enabled economy.

    With Analyzer, documentation professionals can get an entire picture of their Flare or Blaze projects - and fix most issues right in Analyzer. There's no need to flip between products or to print the list of problems and then search through a Flare or Blaze project. Analyzer suggestions can help improve content in several ways. One of the most important is suggesting where authors may want to replace content with snippets or variables.

    "For too long, authors have had to manually review and correct their documentation. With so much detail to evaluate, at best it can take hundreds of hours to identify issues and make the necessary changes. Worst case, authors are literally overwhelmed, and they publish documents with errors and inconsistencies, or they miss important improvements," said Anthony Olivier, MadCap CEO. "MadCap Analyzer applies nearly two decades of best practices in documentation design to powerful reporting and analysis capabilities. For the first time, authors can immediately see what is and isn't working in their content and design, and they can implement improvements based on proven techniques. Manual content review and revisions that previously took hours can now be accomplished in minutes with a few clicks of the mouse."

    Using MadCap Analyzer is easy. An author simply uses Analyzer to open a Flare or Blaze project. The author then immediately sees a list of issues and suggestions for the project. The author can fix the identified problems and make suggested changes. Analyzer also uses suggestions to find locally formatted text that matches existing styles in a project. In this case, Analyzer suggests using the style instead of the local formatting. If the author does not yet have a style that matches the locally formatted content, Analyzer recommends creating one and then helps the author build it.

Information captured in Analyzer includes:
    - Statistics on modification dates plus tallies of words, segments, images, snippets (reusable content pieces), broken links, undefined variables, undefined styles, and topics.
    - Links, such as broken hypertext, bookmarks, image links, external links, absolute links, outgoing links, and incoming links.
    - Topic issues, including topics that are not included in the index or the selected table of contents (TOC), duplicate TOC items, non-XML topics, topics with images, and duplicate context-sensitive help (CSH) map IDs.
    - Unused or undefined elements, such as undefined glossary terms, variables, condition tags, or styles; topics that aren't linked; or unused items such as content files, images, variables, condition tags, styles, or CSH IDs.
    - Used components in a project, including conditional tags, language tags, variables, index keywords, index keyword links, concepts, concept links, images, and style sheets.
    - Reports, which can be completely customized by selecting the types of issues to include (any of the issues already mentioned, plus many more), as well as the look of the report; authors can save reports and open reports in a browser window to print them.

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