House Style for MadCap Flare

House Style is a free plugin for MadCap Flare Desktop. It lints your topics against the Google developer documentation style guide and your team's own rules, and lists the issues it finds. You change or ignore each one, and every change is a Flare tracked change.

Linting runs on your computer at no cost. An AI review, rewrites and other AI features are optional. They use your own Anthropic API key or your company's AI gateway.

Website: https://gethousestyle.com/

Install

1. Download HouseStyle-<version>.zip from Releases and extract all of it.
2. Close Flare.
3. Double-click Install.cmd and approve the administrator prompt. You see the prompt only the first time.
4. Start Flare. The installer turns House Style on, so the House Style tab is on the ribbon.
5. A four-step setup asks how you use House Style, how you use AI and where your style rules are. Then a short practice shows you a first lint. To practice again, select Help > Start the Tour Again.

House Style needs Flare 2026 in the Ribbon interface. Flare 2024 and 2025 aren't tested. Updates install themselves when you close Flare. If something goes wrong, see the install page or docs/README-INSTALL.md.

Docs

For	Read
Writers	The user guide, a Flare project in docs/user-guide (open FlareAI-Guide.flprj)
Pilot testers	docs/TESTER-GUIDE.md
Style guide owners	User guide topics Set up a team style guide, Maintain the style guide and Publish the style guide to Confluence
Gateway admins	docs/bifrost-migration.md
What changed	docs/release-notes/ and House Style > Help > What's New
AI cost	docs/testing/ai-cost.md

Privacy

Style checks run on your computer. When you use an AI feature, the text being checked (for alt text, the image) and the rules that apply go to Anthropic under your key, or to your company's gateway. Your key is encrypted with Windows DPAPI and never logged. House Style sends a report only when you choose Send, or by itself when Send error reports automatically is checked in Settings. Reports never include your topic text unless you type it in, and never your key or settings that could hold a secret. You can see exactly what a report holds before it goes. Once a day House Style asks GitHub for the latest release, with no text, key or identifier. Details: Privacy.

For IT

• Install.ps1 -Silent installs with no questions. Exit code 0 means installed.
• Install.ps1 -Flare 21 picks a Flare version by folder number (22 is Flare 2026, 21 is Flare 2025).
• Install.ps1 -NoAutoUpdate, or an update-policy.json file with {"autoUpdate": false} in the plugin folder, turns updates off. Settings then shows "Set by your IT department".
• Updates are downloaded from this repository's GitHub releases and checked against the release's SHA-256 checksum before they install.

The style guide

The style guide is a Flare project. The plugin ships one (styleguide/); a team keeps its own copy in a shared folder.

• Content/Resources/StyleGuide/Google/: the Google developer documentation style guide, compiled into rules. Generated by tools/FlareAI.GuideCompiler from tools/google-style/source. Don't edit it.
• Content/Resources/StyleGuide/Company/: the team's rules. They win over Google's. Google-overrides.htm holds House Style's default changes to Google's rules; a team's own row for the same rule wins.
• The open Flare project adds its variables, glossary terms and its own Content/Resources/StyleGuide/. They win over both.

Rule format, in short (the guide's About this style guide topic has the rest):

• Bullets are rules for the AI. Nested Bad: and Good: items make them testable.
• Avoid / Use / Severity / Why / Example tables become rules with exact fixes. (delete) in Use deletes the text; an empty Use only flags it. A Pattern column takes a regular expression.
• Rule / Setting / Reason tables disable rules or change their level. House Style writes these rows when someone uses Disable Rule….
• Content condition tags limit a rule to sections with that content (Steps, Code, UI and others). Product tags limit it to products in the guide's Product tag set.
• Every rule has a permanent ID (company:terminology/1) that the AI cites and team feedback is keyed on. It's stored on the rule as id="rule-…", hidden in Flare's editor.

Team files in the guide's FlareAI/ folder: owners.txt (who may change rules; others send requests), layer.txt, attribution.txt, models.json and prompts/. See the user guide topic Set up a team style guide.

To publish the guide to Confluence Data Center, use scripts/publish-guide-to-confluence.ps1. See the user guide topic Publish the style guide to Confluence.

Keeping the Google rules current

tools/google-style/snapshot.py copies developers.google.com/style (CC BY 4.0) into tools/google-style/source with a hash per page. tools/FlareAI.GuideCompiler recompiles changed pages into Google/ topics. Every source unit must be covered by a rule or marked not applicable, and every table row must pass the validator. tools/google-style/coverage.md is the report. These are maintainer tools; writers never need them.

Develop

Prerequisites: Windows, MadCap Flare Desktop 2026, .NET SDK 8 or later, Git, and a .env at the repository root (git-ignored) with ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=.... Architecture: PLAN.md. Flare API notes: docs/flare-api-notes.md.

powershell.exe -File .\scripts\bootstrap.ps1   # find Flare, copy the API DLL, dump the API, build
dotnet build FlareAI.sln -c Debug
dotnet test
.\scripts\smoke-api.ps1        # one real API call with the key from .env
.\scripts\install-plugin.ps1   # as admin: copy the build into Flare's Plugins folder
.\scripts\run-flare.ps1        # start Flare with the key from .env

• tools/FlareAI.Mcp: the same style engine as an MCP stdio server (lint, style_lookup, glossary_lookup, validate_guide, guide_examples, mine_style). .mcp.json registers it for Claude Code.
• tools/FlareAI.Bench: lints the test corpus (corpus/) against its ground truth.
• Test plan, corpus and bug template: docs/testing/.
• Releases: push a v* tag. CI builds, tests and publishes the zip with checksums.txt.

Export for LLMs in CI

House Style > Export for LLMs turns built HTML5 or Clean HTML output into one Markdown file per topic, plus llms.txt and llms-full.txt. For madbuild, add a post-build event to the target:

"<Flare plugins folder>\FlareAI\FlareAI.Mcp.exe" --llm-export "$(OutputDirectory)" --url https://docs.example.com

Where things live

What	Where
Settings, including the encrypted key	%APPDATA%\FlareAI\settings.json
Diagnostics log	%APPDATA%\FlareAI\diag.log
Your own rule changes, when you have no team guide	%APPDATA%\FlareAI\StyleGuide

License

Code: MIT (LICENSE). The Google style rules are derived from the Google developer documentation style guide under CC BY 4.0. See NOTICE.md. Not affiliated with MadCap Software or Google.