MadCap Software Forums

Currently, my team publishes PDFs separately from HTML files (for the html, we use a destination file) for our internal server. We SFTP the pdfs using WINSCP, a whole separate process. We would prefer to simplify our process, and could use some ideas on how to do so.
Our PDFs link off of their HTML topic/page. Which means they are all over in the place in our directory (eg : server/toplevel/internal/project/pdf/projectversion/docfolder/doc.pdf).
I'm kinda gathering that the best practice is to publish them all to one location and then link there. ? something more like: server/toplevel/internal/pdf. ?
I guess that wouldn't affect target and TOC setup, just a presumably new destination file to publish too; that is, we would copy our html destination file and update it for sftp, and choose the single PDF folder as the location to publish to).
Am I thinking about this correctly? Is there a better/simpler way? Best practice I should read?

Thanks folks.

If for each PDF target you use the same destination file you can easily put all of the PDFs in one location. Since it seems you're accessing them via Flare's html output, it really doesn't matter where they live. But typically, they tend to end up in a central location as a general best practice. Sometimes they're published to a location inside the project and linked in the html's toc. I've been a couple places where we produced side-by-side output for awhile. In the first we published PDFs from child projects back into the project, then published the html versions which included toc links to the PDFs. At the second place, we published PDFs to a single location and referenced those pdfs throughout the project.

It boils down to what works best for your team and the project's size and organization. That's not wonderful advice, but every site and team is different and has different workflows. You have to plan your project so that you can manage it with the least headache going forward thinking about all the asks you might get from management.