Observations and questions regarding merged help.

Hi Kurt

It appears that before one generates merged help, the user should ensure that all child projects have been individually generated first so that all recent changes to those projects' content are present in the generated merged help. In short, it appears that generating the parent project doesn't automatically pre-generate the child projects,  Is this correct?

Spot on. Generating the parent only ensures the resulting help is aware of and knows to look for the child projects.

I also experimented with putting text in one of the child topics, and applying conditional build tags to them. I found that the conditional text that appears in the merged, in the text from a particular child project, is whatever conditional text was exposed when the child project was last run. It also seems that the conditional build tags specified in the parent project (via the single source config) has no affect on the text exposed/hidden for the child projects. Is this to be expected? If so, can I expect the same behavior regarding user defined variables?

Indeed, that is normal behavior and yes, the same would apply to user defined variables.

Perhaps it will help to explain conditionals and variables using a different analogy. My favorite analogy is food, as we all have that in common so we all likely understand it. So consider that a parent project is like a layer cake. As there are several layers in a layer cake, it's feasible that each layer may be baked differently. Perhaps one layer is chocolate, another coconut and so on. Using build tags and variables is similar to baking something in that the condition may state Sugar be excluded from the recipe, Just because you excluded sugar from that top layer (or any of the other layers) does not automatically ensure it has been removed from all of them. Perhaps each of them have a variable additive, such as nuts. Like the layer cake, each of the help outputs that are part of the merge will only contain what you told them to contain at the time they were created.

If my observations above are correct, is there any technique or script one can use to cause all child HTML text to be generated (per a specified single source config for each child) first, and THEN generate the merge via generating the parent help?

RoboHelp does offer a "command line generation" option. But I've never used it. Maybe it would be useful here. I'll defer to others on that aspect.

Regardless of the conclusions to the above three items, are there merged project features that you'd like to see added to RH 12?

Hopefully this helps a bit... Rick