Project Help for a Newbie!!

[betelgeuse]

Hey Guys!

Happy to be here and hope to share lots with you in due time! I'm new to Flare. I'm sat here trying to think of all kinds of fun and witty ways of explaining my predicament, but Flare has broken my brain. I use to be funny and light-hearted, now I just sweat a lot.

Anyway, a quick introduction. I'm Matt, a technical writer from Cambridge, England. My background is software development and IT management, and I've done a lot of technical writing for a variety of audiences. I was hired by a company to overhaul their documentation and install a Wiki for them - I won't using Flare here, as one of my skill sets is MediaWiki. However, they have just bought Flare, and no one in the company knows how to use it, that's my job apparently. I've read a 400 page beginners Flare manual and am now au fait with Flares basic functionality and I'm watching lots of recorded webinars on Madcaps website, but I cannot find many good examples of the project I'm about to be killed on.

Project Outline:

• 100(ish) User Guides written in MS Word, length between 30-75 pages per User Guide.

• Currently, these User Guides are converted to PDF and packaged with SDKs (Software Development Kits) for different customers. Customers only see the guides for products they have purchased.

• HTML5/Mobile Targets - I think I understand this part. When a user logs into the website, they will only see the Guides we want them to see, and we will achieve that by setting condition tags.

• PDF/Word Targets - This is the part I'm struggling to visualise. They want to output each of the User Guides to individual pdfs/word docs. So I will need to output them as 100 documents. We will be tying Flare into Subversion and trying to automate the process of publishing the PDF output.

Now, I saw an excellent recorded webinar by Daniel Ferguson (MadCap Flare for the Total Newbie: Why Single-sourcing, Multi-channel Publishing & Collaborative Authoring is Essential) and toward the end of the video, he explained a project whereby he used a single TOC to output 70 PDF/Word documents by setting the "Generate multiple documents ..." option in the Advanced tab of the PDF/Word targets. Then he split the TOC by setting Chapter Breaks. Fantastic idea, and I love this feature in Flare.
However, some of my User Guide TOCs are long, and creating one TOC may not be the best option for me. My questions are:

1. Do any of you guys have experience with a similar project?
2. Would you create one large TOC and split it with Chapter breaks or would you create multiple TOCs?
3. If I created separate TOCs for each User Guide, I would be working with a huge amount of TOCs, is this wise?

If anyone could lend me a little wisdom, and a new brain, it would be very much appreciated.

Yours thankfully,

Matt

[NorthEast]

If you go down the multiple TOC route to make organisation easier, bear in mind you can insert TOCs inside other TOCs.
So you could have a master TOC which is just a list of your 100 smaller TOCs.
Using the 'generate multiple documents' feature you mentioned, if you add a chapter break on each TOC item, it will split each of your 100 smaller TOCs into a separate PDF file.

The disadvantage to that approach is that you can't build individual PDFs, you have to build the whole thing - which if you have 100, could take a long time.

The alternative is to have 100 targets, one for each PDF.
This may make the target list a bit unwieldy (tip - organise them in folders), but you can at least build individual targets.
And if you wanted to build the whole lot together, you could do this using a batch target.

[betelgeuse]

Thanks for your reply Dave!

A question: For every TOC, is a separate document output? For example: if I had 100 TOCs but one PDF target, would it output 100 separate PDFs?
Does it have the same effect as having 100 targets?

[NorthEast]

Yes, one target could generate 100 PDFs, if you use that option.
A separate document is produced at each chapter break point that you insert in the TOC; so you would set a break point on each sub-TOC that you add to your master TOC.

This method is probably simpler to set up than 100 targets, but you do have a bit less flexibility; such as having to use the same target settings for all the PDFs (e.g. conditions, variables), or not being able to specify the file name.

[chunkee]

Welcome to the forums and to Flare! An awesome tool for documentation. Dave is correct in that you would be better off having separation for each manual. Tips include being mindful of the components and how they work together. This can be overwhelming at first and difficult to keep track of, however, you will soon grasp the advantages. Creating snippets, master pages, and page layouts are great for standardizing and reusing content. Good luck and be sure to post questions as they arrive.
Regards,
John C