How Can I Use One Source File in Multiple Projects?

[amatsumoto]

I've been using Flare 3.1 for several months (waiting to upgrade to 4.1) and I come from a FrameMaker mentality. While I love how easy it is to export to WebHelp or printed documents, I don't get how I can reuse a file from one project to another while maintaining only one source file.

A good example is our legal page. Pre-Flare, all of our documentation was in Frame and our legal page was located in a shared content folder. When we created our Frame books, each book file pointed to the legal page file. If the legal page needed updating, we edited the shared file and all of the books would naturally get the changes.

But I don't see how I can do this in Flare. When we created our projects, we added our legal page by selecting Project > Add Topic and selecting a legal page that resided in a different directory. Flare created a local copy of the file in the new project, so now if we need to edit the legal page, we make the changes in one of the files and have to remember to copy the updated file to all of the other projects.

Surely there is a way to have one file in a central location that can be used by multiple projects? How are others handling this? Our need is going to quickly expand to more files than just our legal page.

[LTinker68]

Flare v4 has a project-linking feature. I haven't used it since our projects are tailored to each customer/project so I don't know many details, but your situation is exactly why that feature was added.

[CMTucker]

I did this by importing the content (in your case the leagalese) into each project. The target is set to re-import files when the content is generated. Works like a charm!

[Cecily]

Global Project Linking is the phrase you want to read up on in Flare's help. (Three consecutive prepositions in that sentence - and I think it still makes sense!)