Setting up Webhelp project

[Steveman]

ok, I need some WebHelp about WebHelp.

Having successfully set up PDF output and WebHelp output for individual projects (in my case a project is a manual) I now need to put them all together in one big WebHelp project. The plan is setup a web address and have all of our support stuff on there, including an existing knowledge base, support notes and copies of all manuals. Then we'll use the whizzy search function to find everything.

I've gone through the manual and online help and I'm a bit confused about the best way to set the whole thing up. Do I create WebHelp output for each of the separate manuals and then link them to the new 'master WebHelp project'? Or am I supposed to import the other projects into the master and treat it like one big manual? (although I tried that and although all the content was there to search, only one of manuals appeared in the accordion)

There's a lot of linking options, and merging options etc. I'm just not sure what the simplest approach is. Can anyone help a newbie who is not only new to Flare but new to web as well?

[Steveman]

All by myself I've figured out about merging WebHelp outputs and creating a subsystem folder etc. I've managed to do that successfully for one of the manuals. For some reason I can't get the second manual to appear. I've checked and the output file names are not the same etc. Presumably the whole merge thing works for more than one project?

In my TOC I have set up books for all the manuals that will eventually be merged in there. I've replaced the node with the merged TOC when I've merged my manual. When I build the output for the master one of the merged projects is there, the empty books for two of the other manuals appear (as empty pages which is right) but the book for the second one that I'm merging doesn't appear at all and neither does any of the content.

I'm going to try again today but I'm obviously missing some obscure tick box somewhere.

[ChoccieMuffin]

Tell me what it is when you find out, you're already a step or two ahead of me, as I've only just about figured out PDFing a manual (with much pain and broken fingernails from that flipping cliff) so do share!

[Craig.Prichard]

I will be facing a similar painful experience with my project in a few days. Any guidance, particularly about how to make the PDF as robust and similar to the WebHelp as possible would be appreciated. Thank you.

[NorthEast]

There's a lot of linking options, and merging options etc. I'm just not sure what the simplest approach is. Can anyone help a newbie who is not only new to Flare but new to web as well?

Basically your options include:

- Runtime merging: This is the simplest approach. In this case you would keep separate projects, and you would add links to the other projects/targets in your 'master' project's TOC. This is good for grouping largely independent projects together, and will merge the TOC, search and index. It's not so good if the projects need to be more tightly integrated, such as use shared files or if you need to have a lot of links from the master project to sub-projects (as these are very tedious to set up and impossible to check for errors).

- Project import (aka global project linking): In this case you would create a 'master' project and import the files from your other projects into it. You'd have to plan your file structure in advance and be careful what you import (so you don't get conflicting files overwriting each other). This method is better for creating a more tightly integrated project, e.g. if you want to share common files (such as stylesheets), or if you need to set up links from your master project to the sub-projects. It would allow you to use more features like search filters (e.g. to filter search results from a specific project).

[Steveman]

Thanks guys. Ultimately I've gone with run-time merging. This seems to work well so far. Essentially all of the projects I'm using have the same Global project as a template, so all the structures and stylesheets are the same anyway.

Now I've deleted all the 'extra' targets that come with the linking I've managed to uncomplicate things for myself. Just working on modifying a downloaded skin to change the front end look and then I'm away.

I feel good again.