Repurposing parts of topics in multiple outputs?

[EricAginity]

We have a documentation set that we use to produce online help and a PDF. These are pretty much 1:1 as far as the topics and info contained in them. Now I have a request from our training organization to leverage the documentation in building a training manual. However, they want to use parts of topics, not entire ones, as individual topics in their manual. For example, we have a topic for a feature that contains conceptual information about the feature, an example of how to use it, and reference information for it. This works great in our documentation, but for training, they want the procedural separated from the conceptual and don't want to talk about the reference info.

I'm trying to figure out my options to avoid duplicating work. As far as I see it, I can either cut the topic apart and fix it in the TOC in the online help, I can make the example a snippet and use it in 2 topics (conditionalizing it to be non-training in the Feature topic and just including it in the training example topic), or I can request the training group to not slice and dice topics so finely. Am I missing any alternatives? I'm leaning towards making more granular topics to make them intertwine better, but I do know it will cause more work in the short run to fix the online help.

Any thoughts on different ways to handle this in Flare? I'm not used to sharing as much source documentation outside of the doc group, and since we didn't build everything from the start to be mix and match, I'm trying to get my head around it before I make any costly changes.

Thanks in advance.

[angelabartz]

Do they want all the procedural information in one set of slides and the examples in another? Or do they want procedural information on one slide and then examples immediately following on the next slide?

If it’s the former, then ATM, I can only imagine breaking apart the topics and redoing your TOC. If it’s the latter, then you can cheat and add a conditional Heading1 (or some other level) within your topic that forces the training slide to start on a new page, and you can conditionalize out all the reference information.