Set up House Style

The first time you start Flare with House Style, a four-step setup opens. You can skip any step and change it later.

1. How will you use House Style? Choose To check my own writing, or To set up the style guide for my team. Your answer decides the ribbon. A style guide owner also gets the Style Guide group: Rule Decisions, Import Rules and Test Rules. Anyone listed in the team guide's owners.txt gets that group whatever they choose.
2. How will you use AI? Choose one:
   • No AI (style rules only): linting still works, at no cost.
   • My Anthropic API key: paste your key.
   • My company's AI service (gateway): enter the Base URL and Gateway key that your admin gave you.

   Select Test connection to check the key.

3. Whose rules? Choose Google's guide plus my own changes, or My team's shared style guide folder. For a team guide, select Browse… and choose the folder. Your style guide owner tells you where it is.
4. You're ready. Select Finish.

Your key is encrypted for your Windows account and never written to a log.

Practice your first lint

After setup, House Style offers a short practice: five steps in the issues pane that show you how to lint a topic, change an issue, undo it, disable a rule, and accept your tracked changes on Flare's Review tab. Choose Practice on a sample project, Use the topic I have open, or Skip. A strip at the top of the pane shows each step. Select Skip tour to stop at any time.

To practice again later, select House Style > Help > Start the Tour Again, or Start the Tour Again in Settings > Advanced.

For your first week, the empty issues pane also shows a short Getting started checklist. Select Hide to put it away.

The ribbon

The House Style tab has Lint Topic, Lint Project, Rules, Rewrite, Ask AI, Topic Metadata, Settings and Help. With a team style guide, writers also get My Requests. See Ask for a rule change.

The Help menu has User Guide, What's New, Start the Tour Again and Report a Problem…. See Troubleshoot.

Change a setting

Select House Style > Settings. To go through setup again, select Run setup again….

Tab	What's on it
AI	How House Style uses AI, the key, and Test connection.
Style guide	How you use House Style (a change to the ribbon applies the next time you start Flare), and your team's style guide folder. Leave the folder empty to use Google's guide plus your own changes. Also choose whether to use the open project's variables, glossary and StyleGuide folder.
Linting	Linting while you type, when you save, and when a build starts, and the markers in the editor. See Work in the editor.
Advanced	Models (see Models and cost), timeout, the team feedback folder, the diagnostics log, Send error reports automatically, Markdown export after each HTML build, automatic updates, and the Export for LLMs…, Diagnostics…, Start the Tour Again and Report a Problem… buttons.

House Style sends a report only when you choose Send, or by itself when Send error reports automatically is checked. Reports never include your topic text unless you type it in.