RE: merging separate help systems in InterHelp?

[Carol_Tong -at- i2 -dot- com]

Anne,

I've merged up to 4 InterHelp projects using ForeHelp Premier 2000 on 
Windows NT. It would be helpful to find out more about what you want as an 
end result. If you want users of a particular type to be able to access 
only a subset of the information, why would you want to merge already 
separate Help projects?

Each of the products I document has multiple manuals, and we wanted users 
to be able to access all the equivalent content online (we single-source 
and import Framemaker .mif files into ForeHelp) from one Help call.  I 
don't use conditional text at all; all that I was after was to be able to 
provide a single TOC and single index for all of the Help systems 
together.

Carol Tong
Documentation Engineer
i2 Technologies

-----Original Message-----
From: Wrdfinesse -at- aol -dot- com [mailto:Wrdfinesse -at- aol -dot- com]
Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2001 4:25 PM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: merging separate help systems in InterHelp?


(cross-posted to techwr-l and techcomm-discuss)

Hi all.  Quick question ...

I'm using ForeHelp Premier to generate an InterHelp <quote> =
cross-platform
browser-independent</quote> OLH for a web application.  (Please don't =
start
a tool war here, or use this as a launching point to discuss the =
relative
merits of .xml ...)

The web app is for a collaborative conferencing product; depending upon
which role you're in (a conference presenter or a conference attendee), =
you
see different things and have access to different pieces of =
functionality.
I've been asked if I can write two help systems - one from the =
presenter
point of view, one from the attendee point of view.

Of course, I can do that.  The question - has anyone successfully =
merged two
help systems into a single help project using ForeHelp and outputting
InterHelp?  Such that a subset of information is only available when =
certain
conditions are met?  (I'm outputting .shtml files, so this can all be
"metaphoricalized" based on conditions.)

According to the documentation (yeah, I RTFM ... but who's gonna =
believe the
docs??) it can be done.  The doc gives steps for doing this, but =
doesn't
really explain <b>how</b> it will work.  I'd rather not spend a lot of
bandwidth prototyping, nor do I want to subject my very small and =
horribly
overworked dev
 team to a lot of experimentation, so I'm going to the =
expert
panel - all you whirlers.

Any insight you can provide will be great.

Technical detail for those who need it ... I'm using ForeHelp 5.0.0 on =
a
Win2000 box.  The product will be "servered" (sorry) on WinNT boxes, =
and
accessed by users in a variety of environments (primarily PCs running
WinDoze, and about 83% of our customer base will be using IE as their
browser of choice).

TIA for any and all insight.  Feel free to reply to me privately to =
save
bandwidth - I'll post a summary to the list if anyone's interested.

  Anne Halsey
  wrdfinesse -at- aol -dot- com
  ahalsey -at- raindance -dot- com


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