File structure and Multi-user access/control

Hi,

First off, is access controlled at the file level?

Not sure what you mean by that. In source control, you can check in/out ever file independent. Sometimes dependent files will be automatically checked out, for instance images used in the css when you check out the style sheet.

I want to have multiple authors editing the same manual at the same time, so do I need to break the manual into multiple small files (currently it's a single word doc)?

That be the idea. Anyway, it's not a good idea to have an entire RoboHelp project in a single topic. You probably want to cut up your contents into the small chunck: topics.

If I do break it into multiple files, what's the best approach: 1 file per topic (or is this a requirement)?

In RoboHelp a topic is a HTML file. RoboHelp doesn't force you to split up content into one or more topics. If you are creating help for the web, you want the information to be organized in relatively small chunck so users can quickly scan through it.

Finally, when I come to generate the PDF, will the files be combined. (i.e. can I have different page-breaks than I have in the RH project)?

Not sure what you mean by page breaks. As RoboHelp creates HTML files, there are no page breaks such as in paper manuals. When you create a PDF, you combine the topics you need into a single document.

If a PDF is required for you, you may want to consider not using RoboHelp for your sources. A PDF created by RoboHelp is useful for internal use, but it never seems to get good enough to give to customers. Personally, when a PDF version of a manual is required, I create the manual in FrameMaker and link or import the book into RoboHelp. You can also link Word documents, so you may want to play around with that before deciding whether to use Word, RoboHelp or FrameMaker for your source.

Greet,

Willam