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cry4blood
Known Participant
June 3, 2009
Question

switch between project versions?

  • June 3, 2009
  • 1 reply
  • 870 views

Hey everyone

my job just purchased Robohelp Office and my boss has given me the (doubtful?) honor of finding out how it works.

Now I seem to be getting along with the basics just fine, but now I need to know something I just can't seem to find on the internet: is it possible to switch between two versions of the same project?

I mean like, having one version of the help file published online, while working on an update on the same project without having it emidiately published. I thought I would have to use Robosource for that, but that doesn't seem to be it either... Can someone help me out here?

thanks!

greets,

C4B

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    1 reply

    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 3, 2009

    You need to understand the difference between source files and output files.

    Source files are what you see in Project Manager. Output files are what you generate / publish when you go into the layouts. The options include webhelp and Microsoft HTML Help (CHM). Let's say you are going to create webhelp. You will work on your source files in RoboHelp where you can preview individual topics. When you want to see the whole system, you will generate the output and by default that goes to the !SSL! folder but you can change that in the first page of the wizard. There you can view how it is all looking, how it hangs together and so on. When you want to put it on a server, you will either publish it to a server or hand it over to your developers who will ensure it is put on customer servers.

    Changing the source does not change what is in the !SSL! folder and generating alone does not change what is on the server.

    See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

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    C
    cry4bloodAuthor
    Known Participant
    June 3, 2009

    ok, so in that aspect, that means there's no way for me to save the previous version of my webhelp for later use except by creating a new project? I was hoping it would be possible to upload one version of webhelp, and if need be (for whatever reason at all) to reupload the older version.

    Any suggestions on how I should go about that one?

    thanks for the reply btw, that already helped me understand Robohelp a lot better

    grtz,

    C4B

    RoboColum_n_
    RoboColum_n_
    Legend
    June 3, 2009

    OK. Let's get down to basics. You start off with a brand new RH project. You start creating a few topics and significantly at this point you have no output. Just as Peter says a set of source files. At some point you need to generate your output from your source. You do so as Peter has described and a new set of files are created and published to the required location (e.g. intranet, web, etc.). When this happens, your source files remain exactly as they were before you created the output. You now need to make some amendments to the source. You go back in, amend the topics (maybe add new ones) and then re-generate the output. This by default overrides the previous set of output files. So you see that you can use the same set of source files to generate different sets of help updates.

    That said, you can use your single source layouts to generate your output to go to different locations. Let's not go into that yet though unless you need to know.

    Read the RoboColum(n) for mutterings on RoboHelp, Technical Communication Suite and technical communication.

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