Common Output/Target from Multiple Word Documents

[tmcewan]

I am very new to Flare and I am using version 9.1.1. I have successfully imported one of our existing manuals which is a word document from my company into Flare and made modifications. I have it set to use the Website Output target for html 5 as primary and I have set-up a destination and published the content to our website. It generated its own TOC which I made the master TOC.

Now I am importing another word document into Flare that I would like to Publish using the same location and the same Output and combine the two documents into one master output. The newly imported document created its own master page and its own TOC and so far I have had to change the Master between the TOCs (Document 1 and Document 2) in order to see the output, I have not been able to figure out how to combine the output.

This is probably easy to do but I have spent a few hours looking for a solution and have not been able to find anything that works.

Thanks in advance!

[Nita Beck]

I have some ideas, but first I'd like to know a little more about your objective.

Are you trying to create ONE output that includes topics from both manuals, and the topics will be interspersed, rearranged? In other words, one large, new document?

Are you trying to create ONE output that will have two "books" on the TOC, one equating to the first manual and the other creating to the second manual? In other words, the content of the manuals won't be interspersed?

[tmcewan]

My preference is that they are not interspersed but could be two tabs, or I could change the folder structure such that there are two main folders that contain the contents of each document.

[Nita Beck]

In that case, here's a suggestion: In both TOCs, put all of their TOC items under a top level folder. Then close that top level folder in each. Then float one of the TOCs so that you can see the two TOCs side by side. From the second TOC, drag the folder into the first TOC below its folder. Now you should have two folders on the one TOC. You can freely delete the second TOC, as it doesn't serve any other purpose.

(There are other ways to accomplish what you're after, but having a single TOC like this is the simplest.)

BTW, I suggest that you don't associate the master page or the stylesheet with individual topics. Instead, you should associate them with the target. You can look at the code of some sample topics to see if there is a link to the master page or stylesheet, and then get rid of those. If you're comfortable working in code, you can use the find-and-replace feature to search for that bit of code and replace it with nothing in the entire project. BUT BEFORE YOU DO that, make a backup of your project in case something goes awry.

The reason to not associate the master page or stylesheet at the topic level is so that someday, in future, you could create a different target that uses a different master page or stylesheet, without having to touch the topics themselves.

I hope this helps.