Outputting as raw text with custom xml tags

This forum is for all Flare issues related to styles, stylesheets and XML.
Post Reply
bwofficer
Propeller Head
Posts: 57
Joined: Tue May 12, 2020 2:16 am

Outputting as raw text with custom xml tags

Post by bwofficer »

If I write an error code guide in Flare (for publishing as a PDF) can I also get Flare to compile the text from the error codes table in that guide and output it as a tagged text or customised xml file that the software engineer can import into his project to ensure the text remains consistent?

Alternatively, if the error code text is written and managed externally as an xml file can I somehow link the file into my user docs project in Flare so that I can treat the chunks of text in the external xml file as snippets I can insert into the error codes table in my user docs project?
lc4466
Propeller Head
Posts: 26
Joined: Tue Jun 18, 2019 10:20 am

Re: Outputting as raw text with custom xml tags

Post by lc4466 »

I do this by building the xml files in flare and pulling in the content via snippets, ex:

Code: Select all

<ContentKey1>
        <help>
            <MadCap:snippetBlock src="..[url]" />
        </help>
</ContentKey1>
Then I publish out with the Clean XHTML target. In my case, the developers still have to use a script to translate to json from there, but that was a pretty straightforward script to build from my understanding.

I think using my method for your example there would still be two different topic files - the PDF guide and the xml file - but you could at least share the error text code between them. Not as quite as elegant as figuring out a way to do both in the same file but I couldn't get madcap to quite manage that in a way that consistently worked for my use case. If you figure out something different on your end though I'd love to hear what you did!
Post Reply