TechCommSuite suggested workflow for New Documentation

[peteybrown05]

Hi there,

We plan to buy TechComSuite2 to help with our new product documentation. Previously I have used Robohelp to create .chm files and the like, however now we want to produce several outputs:

Quick start guide

Detailed user manual

Configruation (internal use) documentation

and video help/training materials

TC2 has FM, Robohelp and adobe air etc.

What would teh suggested workflow be to produce and maintain documentation?

Am I right that it should be authored in FM with proper 'tags' set up so that sections are included/excluded from certain outputs.

RobotHelp manages the database of images/screengrabs and videos etc, and then batch processest he generation of output formats?

or, should it be written in robohelp and outputted from there?

im not sure really where best to start, and the videos and tutorials I have seen seem to be a little bit too focused on how to do things rather than how the workflow should be structured.

Any suggestions or advise?

cheers

peter brown

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Your workflow with TCS2 would be to author in FM and either link or import the FM books/docs into RH for help system generation. All images would be in your FM docs as it is your "content repository". PDF output would come from FM (probably). Your video work could be done in Captivate and either imported into your FM docs (and then into RH) or output directly from Captivate (all depends on the packaging you want).

[peteybrown05]

thank you. that is helpful.

The images that are in FM - does FM maintain a 'database' of images, so that if an image is used in multiple places in the document and needs to be updated - am I right to say that it is updated in one place only and the change ripples through?

Also, supposing our Quick start guide is a subset of the larger usermanual - are these "tags" (not sure if thats the right terminology) configured in FM so that RH then extracts the correct tags into the corretc output document?

thanks again for help and advice,

very useful to a noob.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Only in the sense that they are stored & named whatever you want and then you make a reference to them in your FM docs. So that if you change an image (& keep the same name), the change will ripple through your FM docs.

You would use conditional text to identify what chunks of content belong in what output help - there's 2 ways of doing this - you can show/hide conditions in FM and tell RH to import only what you want OR you can pull everything into RH and then tell it to show/hide in the help output based on those conditions.

[MichaelKazlow]

On a related note, you would not import the graphics directly into Frame, per se, you would import by reference. For any captivate swf files you use, while they can be imported into Frame for export to pdf. It unfortunately an iffy proposition. I have found it better, but more of a pia, to import the swfs into the pdfs directly.