MadCap Software Forums

Just wanted to hear how people handle reuse when the image is the only thing that's changed.

Basically, we publish manuals for machines that are similar but one-off so it's pretty common that text stays the same but the image has changed. Manuals are not often updated once released but are sometimes. For example, I have a topic that looks like:

DPF Safety Switches

This DPF has two safety switches.

<image>

To reset an activated safety switch, etc.

The topic could end up being used in many different manuals as time go on with the image being replaced in each one. So I'm considering how to manage this:
1. Just replace the image. If the original manual and image is required at some point, access through source control using timestamp (assuming we go with using source control).
2. Add a new image each time with a condition set to that specific manual.
3. Split the topic into three and have the image as it's own topic. (this seems messy as the topics won't make sense on their own)
4. Use snippets to insert the text above and below and create new topic for each manual with a different image.

Are there other options? What do other people do?

Thanks
Madeline

We tend to go with option 2 - use conditions. However, our "use case" is a bit different.
We sometimes need a different screen shot for help in our different regions as the fields or wording might be a bit different. But we would only have 2 or 3 images in only a few topics, so this is still easy to maintain.

Thanks. I'm going to start with that option and see how we go over time. It'll just be me initially so it won't be too much overhead to change processes if needed down the track.