Multi-Lang Best Practices

[TwinCessna]

We must start providing online help to support multiple languages.
English, Arabic, French, and Chinese.
We use RoboHelp x5 today and many HelpIDs are manually assigned.

Initial questions about using RH7 to manage multi-languages:
1. What is the best way to get my English RHP project from RH5 into RH7?
Simply open it inRH7 or Import into an \english folder within the RHP.

2. When taking the English RHP that uses HelpIDs and maintaining it to now support other languages, what is the best way to handle the context-sensitive issue.
--Can I use the same English help topic HelpIDs within the Arabic, Chinese, French (as long as the Arabic/Ch/Fr help topics match).

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi TwinCessna.

Let me start by saying that we am still (just about) producing just single language documentation so very much SingleEngineByPlane

For your first question, I'd say it would be best to maintain separate RH projects for each language. However this would depend on the size and complexity of the project. You could use conditional build tags inside a single RH project but this could get a little unwieldy on larger projects.

For your second question, if you maintained separate projects, you could just copy the mapids between projects as the topics would be the same content in the same folder structure - just the language would be different. The mapids are just a marker against the topic and are not affected by language settings.

I'd suggest downloading the RH7 trial and testing out the above before making any firmer decision. You'd just need a couple of projects (e.g. English and French) with a few topics with mapids.