Build-dependent Webhelp Topic File Names

[Rainer Oehry]

We have several projects with quite a lot of graphics and not so much text, that we need to publish in German and English. I know that it is not recommended, but we have the text in both languages in the topics, separated by build conditions.

Currently we publish the two versions of these documents to PDF and CHM, but we are evaluating to publish some of them as WebHelp in the future. The question is, whether we need two separate websites or whether we could merge both languages in the same website structure. For that, we would need to have different names for the individual html files according to their language.

Is it possible to publish a project as WebHelp with two different build options and create all topics with a distinguishing addition to their file name? Example: The topic with ID topic1 should result in a topic1_DE.html file when published with the the include option for German, and in a topic1_EN.html file when published with the include option for English. Of course a link in topic1 to topic2 should then result in a link from topic1_DE.html to topic2_DE.html.

Is there a "direct" way to do it? Or would it be possible by adding a build-specific variable somewhere in the HTML template or whereever?

[Tim Green]

Hi Rainer,

Is it possible to publish a project as WebHelp with two different build options and create all topics with a distinguishing addition to their file name?

No, this is physically impossible and it would also not be effective. You would not be able to separate the keyword index and search results and that will give very confusing results for your users. Similarly, the TOC would also be combined and could not be filtered, and would also be very confusing and would not look very professional.

There is a much better solution: Create separate projects in two separate WebHelp folders with identical TOC structures and topic IDs for both. Call one folder /en/ and the other folder /de/. Then you only need to make that one small change in the URL to send users to the correct topic in their language. Everything else remains identical and the TOC, keyword index and search will all be correct for their language.