How to use H&M 6 Conditional, Customized output

[Ivonne Alemany]

I'm new to H&M and one of the features I think are most exciting about this tool is that H&M is a single source that not only outputs exactly the same info to different formats but also supports conditional and customized output to include different content versions for different output formats. I've read the user manual. Can some one walk me through how to do this?

[Tim Green]

Hi Ivonne,

To include different chapters for two different clients you just need to tag the chapters you want to include/exclude with "build options" that you can then select when you are publishing your variants. Build options can either be on the basis of output format (for example "include this content in PDF and that content in WebHelp"), or of user-defined conditions ("include this content for CLIENTA and this content for CLIENTB"). If you want to create different variants of the same output format (PDF) you need a user-defined build condition:

1) Open your project in Help & Manual and in the Project Explorer on the left scroll down and expand to Configuration > Common Properties > Custom Builds

2) Select the Add button on the right and create two build tags for your two clients, for example CLIENTA and CLIENTB. The "Display Text" is the text that will be displayed later to allow you to select the tags. (If you want you can just use any of the standard custom options and change its display text option)

3) In the table of contents, select the topic or chapter that you only want to include for Client A. Right-click on it and in the Include in Builds sub-menu select the CLIENTA option. DEselect ALL other options (this is actually automatic, but it's good to get into the habit of checking it).

4) Repeat Step 3 for the other topic, using the other build option and save your project.

5) Now select Publish and select PDF as the output format. You will see an "Include Options" box at the bottom of the dialog. In the version for ClientA SELECT the Client A option and DEselect ALL other options. Do the same for the Client B version with the include option for that client.

Notes:

*) Include options must be applied to ALL the topics you want to control with them. Applying an option to a chapter does not automatically exclude the topics of that chapter in all output formats, it only excludes the topics' TOC entries. You have to explicitly apply the options to all the topics (you can select multiple topics with Ctrl+click and Shift+click). In PDF this doesn't matter so much because only topics that have TOC entries can be included. In HTML-based formats topics without TOC entries, the associated topic files can be included "invisibly" and will still be found by the search and keyword index.

*) Include options use OR logic. This means that the tagged content will be included if ANY ONE of its include options evaluates to TRUE. For example, if a topic is tagged with both CLIENTA and PDF, then it will always be included in PDF output, no matter what, but it will only be included in other output formats if CLIENTA is selected in the publish page.

You can also include and exclude content inside topics using the same build options. For that you use the Conditional Text tool in Write > Insert Object. You select the content you want to include or exclude, select the tool and then choose IF or IFNOT and then the include option you want to apply.