Merging projects and Editing

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Sean Godley
Posts: 92
Joined: Sun Apr 24, 2016 6:10 am

Merging projects and Editing

Unread post by Sean Godley »

Hi all,

I am having a problem with Help and Manual when it comes to merging projects. I am merging three old manuals into one manual (as the company I work for sells bundles). However, I am encountering a problem because when projects are merged they are read-only. I know that I can disable this using the configuration settings, but then when I edit them in the new project the old versions are also edited. Is there any way I can avoid this without having to manually copy and paste all the pages of the old manuals into the new one? This would equal 800+ pages.

Thanks,

Sean
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Tim Green
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Re: Merging projects and Editing

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Sean,

If you're inserting the projects as modules then you aren't really merging anything. You are just creating a live link to the original project and when you edit it you are editing the original because there is no copy. The insertion in the master project's TOC is really just a link to the original project. If you want to maintain the projects you are merging in as separate projects that you want to edit separately then you just need to make copies of them and insert the copies as modules instead.

When you are using modules like this you also need to be aware that the projects ARE actually merged physically when you publish/generate your output. This means that you need to ensure that there are no duplicate topic IDs in the projects you are merging in. Otherwise the topics with the same IDs will overwrite each other in the generated output, creating all kinds of errors.

Images are not a problem, because Help & Manual only stores the image file names in the topics, not their locations. It finds the images by looking through the folders listed in your Project Search Path (Configuration > Common Properties > Project Search Path) from top to bottom and inserting the FIRST image it finds with a matching name. So you can move or copy the image files anywhere you want; you just need to edit the folders list in the Search Path in the master project so that Help & Manual can find them.

If you really want to create a single monolithic project with all the contents of the other projects that is actually quite easy. Instead of copying and pasting from the topic editor, you copy and paste from the TOC. Then everything gets copied and inserted in the TOC, and Help & Manual will then automatically correct any duplicate IDs by adding numbers to them (this doesn't happen with modules, you need to check the IDs yourself there).

The easiest way to do this is to open Help & Manual twice, so that you have two separate windows, one with the source project and one with the project you are adding to. Then you use CTRL+Click and SHIFT+Click to select blocks of topics in the TOC of the source project and CTRL+C to copy to the clipboard. Then you click in the TOC of the target project and press CTRL+V to insert the block of copied topics and chapters.

Note that this doesn't copy the styles from the other projects. So any styles defined in the source projects that are not defined in the target project won't be available until you define them there. The easiest way to handle styles you are sharing between multiple projects is to put them in a style repository. Then you can use the same styles for all your projects and edit them in one central location. See here for details:

http://www.helpandmanual.com/help/index ... tories.htm
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
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