MadCap Software Forums

Has anyone else yet encountered and found a workaround for the problem of picture file names in linked projects? That is, if I have project A with 100 pictures in it, the file names generated by Flare in its Resources\Images folder for those pictures will occupy a series of names, for example, 030000A0.png thyrough 03000099.png. If I import topics from another project B with 20 pictures in it, the file names generated by Flare for that project will occupy a similar series of names, for example, 030000A0.png through 03000016.png. That is, the project B pictures have the same names as some of project A's files. During import, Flare will not overwrite the target project's picture files that have the same names (good). But the imported topics will display the existing project A images instead (bad).

MadCap Support has no workaround that will retain links to the source project so that when changes to the parent project are made, they will be reflected in the child project. There will apparently be a new HTML file import feature in Flare 6 but it's not yet clear if will be a true linkable import like the current ones. Without file name conflict resolution, project linking has very limited value for me. I can't believe they didn't think this all of the way through.

As a temporary workaround, could you rename the images folder in one of the projects? So instead of Images it's ImagesProjB or something like that? That would theoretically keep the images in different folders in the final output, and you can have two files with the same name in a project, so long as the files are in different folders. So 030000A0.png in Resources\Images is considered different from 030000A0.png in Resources\ImagesProjB.

And are you talking about project linking or about merging projects, because they're two different things.

Thanks for the quick reply, LTinker68. I just came to the same conclusion from a different direction. If you place the images in project B in a subfolder of Resources\Images, then when project A imports it, Flare will create a corresponding subfolder for the incoming images and update the links. It looks a little odd in project B since the Images folder is empty, but you can also use that as a reminder that the project is linked to another project. It looks a little tidier in project A since the subfolder is a "child" of the Images folder.