Reimport Word document without changing output order?

[Gamepro]

I have a big "master" Word document that contains everything and is constantly updated, and I'm using Flare to cut it up into little topics and omit certain topics/change the order for different PDF output files. To my knowledge, the way to do this is through condition tags, and mark certain topics as only being for PDF1 and this topic is only for PDF2, etc. But seeing as the Word document is constantly updated with new text and edits and pictures, I have to reimport the "master" Word document to update all the topics, and poof my condition tags are gone, as well as any tweaks to the Flare stylesheet, etc.

There must be some simple way to do easily update the topics through Word reimporting without changing the different PDF output orders/omissions.

[SteveS]

Interesting problem...

Normal advice is to use Flare as your authoring environment was you have imported so you do not have to do what you are going through.

If this is not possible, and I guess it isn't, you need to come up with a cunning plan, known as plan B

If your reimport creates similar documents each time, you might consider creating an import project to convert Word to Flare and then copy the changed topic into your proper project.

Another idea - use track changes in Word to highlight changes and then cut and paste the modified content into Flare.

HTH, or at least starts the ball rolling!

[Gamepro]

Thanks for the advice. Yeah using Flare exclusively after the import was a thought, as well as creating separate projects/TOCs for each output and having the Word import overwrite the topics but not the TOC layouts (copying and pasting would be a real hassle in my situation since there's lots of changes every day and it'd be lots of work), but doing either method there's one simple little problem I can't figure out. Since I would be likely creating a bunch of different TOCs for different outputs either way (the TOC layout thing in project manager, not the actual table of contents), whenever I create some new general topics to be used in each one, I don't know how to quickly add the topics to all of the TOC layouts without cumbersomely dragging and adding the topics to the specific place in each one.

[SteveS]

Are you using multiple projects?

I'm not sure what you mean by adding topics to 'the TOC layout thing in project manager, not the actual table of contents'...

[Gamepro]

Are you using multiple projects?

I'm not sure what you mean by adding topics to 'the TOC layout thing in project manager, not the actual table of contents'...

No I'm using one project. The TOCs I'm talking about is when you enter Project Organizer, then TOCs. I'm thinking of creating a different TOC for each output. But if I had, say, 8 different TOCs, and I wanted to add a new general topic to all of them, it's very cumbersome to add the topic to each TOC one at a time. I haven't figured out if there's a more efficient way of doing it.

[LTinker68]

I haven't figured out if there's a more efficient way of doing it.

Use conditional tags. If you apply an exclude conditional tag to a TOC entry, then the TOC entry will be excluded, but the topic will be included in the output, unless you're generating print output, in which case it won't be in the output (because the content of print output is based on what is in the TOC).

If you apply an exclude conditional tag to a topic, then the topic won't be in the output and won't be in the generated TOC, even if its entry is still in the TOC. Likewise if you apply an excluded conditional tag to a folder -- all its contents and their related TOC entries will be excluded from the output.

For example, I have an "intermediate" and an "advanced" output. I use one TOC, but several folders and individual topics have an "advanced" conditional tag applied to them, which means they won't show up in the output or in the generated TOC of the intermediate version (output). Although in that case I don't need to apply the conditional tag to the TOC entries, I do just so I can tell at a quick glance which topics in the TOC are slated only for the advanced version.

[Gamepro]

I haven't figured out if there's a more efficient way of doing it.

Use conditional tags. If you apply an exclude conditional tag to a TOC entry, then the TOC entry will be excluded, but the topic will be included in the output, unless you're generating print output, in which case it won't be in the output (because the content of print output is based on what is in the TOC).

If you apply an exclude conditional tag to a topic, then the topic won't be in the output and won't be in the generated TOC, even if its entry is still in the TOC. Likewise if you apply an excluded conditional tag to a folder -- all its contents and their related TOC entries will be excluded from the output.

For example, I have an "intermediate" and an "advanced" output. I use one TOC, but several folders and individual topics have an "advanced" conditional tag applied to them, which means they won't show up in the output or in the generated TOC of the intermediate version (output). Although in that case I don't need to apply the conditional tag to the TOC entries, I do just so I can tell at a quick glance which topics in the TOC are slated only for the advanced version.

Yeah conditional tags easily work if I were to just abandon Word and make all my changes in Flare, but since I'm really trying to just reimport the Word document when changes are made, conditional tags would simply get overwritten when I reimport it. But I just thought of a good idea. If I were to unlink the TOC from the main document and apply my conditional tags to that TOC, then the topics can get updated while my TOC and its conditional tags stay. Then, when a new topic is created or switched around, I only have to manually add it to that one ToC and apply a conditional tag if needed.

Of course the drawback is still that I can't apply conditional tags to text within topics or the topics themselves since they'll still get overwritten. I suppose there's no way getting around that?

[GregStenhouse]

3 things you've touched on:

• The TOC (name based on import file) will be overwritten each reimport. The only way around this is to break the link (e.g. make a a copy of the file and use that in your targets), but you have to manually update the TOC(s) each time with any new topics. As a tip, open the imported TOC, right-click the tab and select Floating. Then you can drag and drop any new TOC entries to your other TOCs (much easier than manually creating new entries in each of your TOCs each time).
• Conditions (when applied to topics) are overwritten each import. No easy way around this, I've experimented with multiple import files and applying conditions to the folder name, and this works to a limited extent. The best approach (and this works with Frame but is not available in word I don't think) is to tag all text in the 'topic' at the source with a condition. That will exclude the text from the output, but not the topic from the TOC (so you will get a TOC entry that goes nowhere). Exporting/importing to a child project I don't think would work as you are still importing condition-less topics from after the word import.
  With manual TOCs you can exclude topics by condition (or just not include them). For print outputs this will work. For help/online outputs, those topics will still be accessible via search. No easy way around this other than manually conditioning topics each import. You can speed this process up using filename markers (e.g. name the start of each topic with an abbreviation of the condition so you can bulk-apply the same condition tag in Flare), again I think this is for FrameMaker import only (not word).
• stylesheet - if you choose to associate an existing stylesheet (rather than creating one based on word styles) then it should not be overwritten each import?

HTH
Cheers
Greg