RH7: How to handle almost-identical instances of material

[avi10000]

Hi all RH people,

A RH 7 question.

I have some material -- some text, a pic, and a table -- that gets used a number of times in the documentation, but with certain words modified as according to the actual topic.

I can make the material into a snippet and import it every time I need it, but of course that won't help me with the word modifications for each different instance.

So what I need is a way to pass text arguments into the snippet.

Can I do this in RoboHelp 7?

Or is there some other way of doing this?

TIA

- avi

[avi10000]

Better add: I already sent this question to another list. I received ideas, but no solutions.

- avi

[RoboColum_n_]

There is no way I can think of to do this with snippets but you could use variables. Just change the variable value for the text as required. Alternatively, I'd be tempted to have a dummy project with all the instances of the text in seperate topics which you could then import as and when required.

[avi10000]

Thanks for the response, Colum.

>> There is no way I can think of to do this with snippets
Maybe in RH9 ...
I thought that this is the typical sort of thing that Single Sourcing should do.

>> but you could use variables. Just change the variable value for the text as required.
Ummm ... can 't see how that would work. I need all the different topics (identical except for a few words) in the same project at once.

>> Alternatively, I'd be tempted to have a dummy project with all the instances of the text in seperate topics which you could then import as and when required.

Not sure this would help me. I have three topics, which are almost identical, except for a few words.

I have a very simple, "square, vanilla" idea that would do it. Just have a dummy topic with all the material, but where the words differ, I would substitute searchable place holders, one or more as needed, for the word instances, e.g.,"!<feature_name>!" . Then I can import or copy-paste that material section as needed and then do a Find-Replace on "!<feature_name>!" to insert the words I need for the specific topic. But this is very lo-tech. I would have expected something better in 2009.

Maybe you meant the same thing, but in different words.

- avi

[RoboColum_n_]

Nearly avi. I had thought you could have a project with a list of topics with the exact text you require, although I concede you may need multiple versions of the same topic. You could then import them as required.

You could even have them as part of the real project and apply a conditional build tag to them which you could append to the single source layout so they are excluded from the output. That way you could have the topics open in a tab (in RH7 onwards and just copt/paste the text as required.