Shared Topics

[jep1955b]

Other than the fact we imported from Author-IT, I guess all the background does not matter.

Situation:

HELP <-- PROJECT
Subject1
Subject2
Subject3
Subject4

All works and publishes with the templates and such correctly.

User Guides
Subject1 <-- PROJECT
Subject3 <-- PROJECT

Unfortunately, these projects are COPIES of everything from the topic/child topics in HELP. They do publish as expected (their unique templates). But since they are a unique COPY, updating Subject1 in one place or the other does not update the other.

Certainly there is a way of using either the HELP Topic/children in the User Guide or vice-versa? And how to FIX the current situation to change the "topic pointer" in the User Guides to use the topic from HELP?

[Tim Green]

Hi Jep,

If I understand you correctly, you have created a Help+Manual project with topics that are copies of topics from another project.

Certainly there is a way of using either the HELP Topic/children in the User Guide or vice-versa? And how to FIX the current situation to change the "topic pointer" in the User Guides to use the topic from HELP?

The way to do this is to use the Snippets function and link the topic files you want to use in multiple projects instead of copying them. To use topics from another project like this the project must be saved in the uncompressed HMXP format, so that you can link the topics directly from the \Topics folder inside the project folder. This is also the best format for editing projects because it is the most secure against Windows crashes and also supports more features.

If you are using single-file HMXZ, select Save As... in the main File menu at the top left and save in the uncompressed format, in an empty folder. After that, go to Configuration > Common > Project Search Path in the new copy and change the path settings of your image folders to the new locations. This would also be a good time to move all your images into a subfolder of your new project folder (then update the search path for that). Then you can move the entire project around without changing the search path settings, because the images are now inside the project folder.

To use topics from another project as snippets now:

1. Create a new empty topic and click inside this topic.
2. Select the snippet tool and select the options From File, Snippet is Linked, Snippet Starts a New Paragraph.
3. Select the topic file from the \Topics folder of the other project.
4. Repeat 1-3 for all the topics you want to share.

See this topic in the documentation for full instructions on using snippets:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/help/hm_w ... ppets.html

[jep1955b]

Thanks. That gets me on the right track.

I tried deleting everything in my guide topic and snippeted (is that a word?) from the help topic. That worked great. Just that changes are not transferring back and forth and I need to figure out why. In theory they are sharing the same topic file (xml).

I MAY have to DELETE the original and recreate it since the underlying previous stuff my still be pointing local and essentially overwriting the current local topic.

[jep1955b]

Yup. Have to REMOVE the old and replace otherwise it still thinks it is supposed to be the local file even with a snippet in it. It "overrides" the settings.

Too bad I can't edit the PATH directly for a topic and not just the topic NAME. (Actually - I probably CAN do that directly in the files...)

[Tim Green]

Too bad I can't edit the PATH directly for a topic and not just the topic NAME. (Actually - I probably CAN do that directly in the files...)

Do not even THINK about doing something like that. Project topics must be in the /Topics folder and nowhere else.

[jep1955b]

The topic sharing is working well! Now, a new issue:
Topic1
Topics
Images

Topic2
Topics
Images

Sharing Topic1's topics as snippets works well. But -- I lose my pictures since they are all relative (ie: Topic one points to *its* topic folder.

I'm hoping I can use a single image and share it somehow?

[Tim Green]

Sharing Topic1's topics as snippets works well. But -- I lose my pictures since they are all relative (ie: Topic one points to *its* topic folder.

I'm hoping I can use a single image and share it somehow?

There are two ways you can do this. The first is simple: In the project containing the snippets, go to Configuration > Common > Project Search Path and add the folders containing the images in the other project to the search path list. Then Help+Manual will look for image files there as well. You just need to take care that there are no duplicate image filenames in any of your image folders. Help+Manual locates images by looking through the folders in the search path from top to bottom and using the first matching filename it finds. So if you have duplicates in other folders, they will never be found.

The alternative is to manage your snippets files centrally in a style repository, that will also allow you to use the same stylesheet for all your linked projects. Then your snippets will have direct access to their image files as well, and you will have consistent formatting for everything across all projects, including the snippets. See the chapter on style repositories in the More Advanced Procedures section of the documentation for details.

[jep1955b]

Got it all worked out now! Works great.

Still have a 10 year old disaster from the never formatted correctly Author-IT to sort, but I have a process and this is going to be sweet when we are done!

Thanks.