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About Auto Suggestion

When you first start typing content, a popup may display below your text as you type. This is the Auto Suggestion feature, which analyzes text as you type and compares it to other content (e.g., phrases, variables, snippets) that already exists in the project, like this:

This means you can quickly select existing content from the popup so that you do not have to finish typing it.

By default, Auto Suggestion is enabled when you first launch Flare. However, you can disable and enable this feature whenever you want. See Enabling and Disabling Auto Suggestion.

Types of Auto Suggestion Content

There are three kinds of content that you can select when using Auto Suggestion: phrases from custom lists, variables, snippets.

Phrases from custom list Rather than automatically basing auto suggestions on all of the text throughout your entire project, you have control over the phrases that you see in the popup when you type. You can add your own words and phrases to an auto suggestions list. That way, instead of being overwhelmed with too many suggestions every time you begin typing text, you only see suggestions that you are likely to use.
Variables Flare recognizes when you are typing content that matches existing variables in your project. This includes system variables, such as the date and time, and custom variables that you create. See About Variables.
Snippets Flare recognizes when you are typing content that matches existing snippets in your project. This makes it a very fast and convenient way to single-source your content. See About Snippets.

example

Let's say you work on a team of 15 writers and there are a series of snippets in all of your projects that begin with the same three words—For more information…

Perhaps each person knows to start typing those words in certain places. But what if a snippet already exists with the full content that the writer needs? Without knowing that, a person might spend time typing all of the content, and maybe even create a new snippet for future use. But if Auto Suggestion is enabled, as soon as a person types a certain number of characters, all matching snippets are shown in the Auto Suggestion popup. Therefore, the writer can quickly find and select the appropriate snippet.

Tasks for Using Auto Suggestion

Following are the primary tasks that you can perform with Auto Suggestion in Flare.

Enable/disable auto suggestions You can enable and disable auto suggestions from the Options dialog (Tools>Options>Auto Suggestion tab). You can enable or disable the suggestions from particular files (i.e., those from a specific auto suggestions word list, those from specific variable sets), in case you want to use some types of suggestions but not others. You can also enable or disable suggestions from all snippets. See Enabling and Disabling Auto Suggestion.
Specify auto suggestion details (number and character length) You can specify the maximum number of suggestions shown in the Auto Suggestion popup (from 1 to 25), as well as the minimum number of characters that must be typed before the popup opens with suggestions (from 3 to 12). See Specifying Auto Suggestion Details.
Add auto suggestion list files In addition to snippets and variables, you can create a custom auto suggestions list and add your own words and phrases to it. If you type content matching text in your auto suggestions list, those phrases will be displayed in the popup. The first step to doing this is to add an auto suggestions list file to your project. See Adding Auto Suggestion List Files.
Create and edit auto suggestion lists After you add an auto suggestion list file to your project, you can add words, phrases, or sentences (256 character limit) to it. You can do this directly in the Auto Suggestion List Editor, or you can right-click selected text in the XML Editor and use the context menu to add it to the auto suggestions list file. See Creating and Editing Auto Suggestion Lists.
Insert auto suggestions into content When you begin typing in a content file, the Auto Suggestion popup opens if Flare finds matching text in an auto suggestion list file, snippet, or variable. You can then choose a match from the popup and insert it into your document. See Inserting Auto Suggestions Into Content.