Share information among projects / manuals

[garcia3000]

I'm using RoboHelp x7 to update several manuals in the same business area.

There is repetitive information in these manuals (and you can't really define a central project) and instead of replicating this information manually in every instance, I'd like to define a central "repository" of information, change it centrally and have it automatically replicated in every manual.

I've researched the snippets functionality and this doesn't quite satisfy our need. Merge Webhelp functionality seems to be the closest to an adequate alternative, yet it doesn't allow to merge only parts of projects. Is there any way to solve this problem?

[Peter Grainge]

<quote>it doesn't allow to merge only parts of projects</quote>

Use build tags to exclude what you don't want in a particular build. Create multiple layouts, with and without the build expression and it should be quite straightforward.

[garcia3000]

Thanks for your reply.

I'd like to point out that there are two levels of variable complexity in the manuals I'm working on. The first level regards the clients of the manuals - to discriminate information by client we're using tags, i.e, we have one tag for each client and another tag excluding each client (which is helpful in certain functionalities).

But there is another level of complexity regarding information replicated in all 10 manuals or only in part of them (and this doesn't have to do with the manual destinataries) and I'm not sure tags offer an adequate solution to this problem, since the management of these tags would be very complex: we are dealing with large manuals (each has more than 300 pages and some have 600); besides there are bits of information (and quite a lot of "bits") replicated several times, and ideally these would be treated centrally. Can you suggest some alternatives to deal with this particular problem? Thanks in advance.

[RoboColum_n_]

To be honest it sounds like whatever approach you use you will always have a certain level of complexity. I still think that build tags are the way to go. It is going to be about working out the different build expressions to use in each instance and setting up a different SSL for each one.