Hi there
I'll be happy to fill in the missing detail for the options
you mentioned.
These pertain to the process of Publishing your WebHelp. And
that process is vastly different than Generating. But so so many
users confuse the two.
You have a RoboHelp HTML project consisting of Source files.
Perhaps they are in the following location:
C:\Projects\MyProject
You Generate WebHelp and that process modifies each of the
Source files. They end up in the Output location. Assuming the path
I listed earlier, that location would be:
C:\Projects\MyProject|!SSL!\WebHelp
Now the Publish process comes into play. The Publish process
copies the files from the WebHelp output folder to another
location. Perhaps a server. So here is what those options do.
Normally, the first time you publish, each file is copied
from the Output Folder to the Server. As each file is copied, it is
logged in a file that tracks dates, times, file name, etc. The
first time you publish, ALL files are copied.
Subsequent publishes then only copy across the files it
senses have been changed. So as it is copying, each file is
compared to the list. Is it newer? No. Don't copy. So the first
publish process may copy perhaps 1500 files. But the second time
you publish, maybe only 20 files are actually copied, as those are
the only ones that changed.
Republish all says to ignore the list and just copy ALL the
files again. You may wish to choose this if perhaps your IT folks
advised you a server crashed and suggested checking all your links
to ensure they are all working after they restored from a backup.
Fuhgeddaboudit! Don't waste time checking links. Just republish all
and you will know you are good to go.
Check for Deleted files doesn't do what you may think it
does. You might see that and think that if you deleted a folder of
files from your project, RoboHelp will also clean those files off
the server. Nope The key thing to remember with this is that The
publishing process will never ever delete files off the server. If
you need files removed, you will need to do that manually.
So what does it do? It slows the publishing process down. If
that option is enabled, not only does the process check to see if
the files are newer and need to be copied, it also checks the
server to ensure the files still exist! If one has gone missing, it
will be copied over. Even if it's not newer.
Hopefully that helps... Rick