How do I merge all of my HTML5 small projects into one big project for a Support site?

[lukep847985]

Hi all,

I am new to RoboHelp 2015/17. And I have created a series of small help projects all outputting to HTML5. Now, I have been asked by management to merge all of these projects into one big project so I can have one big searchable database of all of our products on one help site.

Does anyone know practically how to do this?

I have reviewed Adobe help files and they all talk about HTML, Adobe Air etc, but nothing about HTML5 outputs. My projects are all based on HTML5, so is there any resources I can access on how to do this?

Thanks and kind regards,

Luke

[Peter Grainge]

At this stage you need to decide whether you want to merge all your source projects or keep them separate and merge the outputs. That will depend on a number of considerations.

If you go for merging outputs, the TOCs for each will be consecutive, albeit in any order you want. Whilst you can fudge a topic from one project into the TOC of another, it's not the most efficient way of working.

If you now merge all your source projects into one it might, from the sound of it, be a more efficient way forward. To do that you would pick on one source project and import all the topics from the other projects.

How many projects do you have and how many topics? If the numbers are not too great, a single project might be easier to manage and give you more flexibility regarding arrangement of the TOC. It might also be preferred by your developers as they will only need to make calls from one output.

The process for merging HTML5 outputs is the same as merging WebHelp. See Merged Help on my site.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring information

@petergrainge

[lukep847985]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your thoughtful and informative feedback.

To answer your question, I have 4 help projects.

1. Contains 8 topics
2. Contains 9 topics
3. Contains 3 topics
4. Contains 40+ topics

I do agree they would be more efficient if we merge them into once source project. However, I do need to consider that 1 and 2 are translated into different languages but 3 and 4 will not be. They are also in separate help files (DE, ES and SV), so I guess we could manage that, as I will not introduce multi-language in the help site. But it could be an option.

Based on my feedback to you, what do you and others recommend. Stick to what you suggested, or change things?

Thanks very much and kind regards,

Luke

[Peter Grainge]

Ignoring translation, my own approach would be to merge it all into one project because it is so small.

Taking translation into account, you need to think of it from the point of the person doing the translation. They need to know which topics need to be translated and which don't. If you keep the topics that need to be translated separate from the others, then you can easily tell the translator what they work on.

The structure for the TOC can be quite independent of the source structure. Translation is best done by keeping giving the translator a copy of the project that they translate. When you update, their software tells them what has changed and they just translate that. That method should still work for you as far as I can see.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring information

@petergrainge