What's covered?Sometimes instead of creating merged help, what you want to do is create one project. Here's how. |
Sometimes you have some projects that you want to appear as one to the user. For those "Merged Projects" are what you want.
Sometimes though you want to create one project from two or more existing projects so that you only have one project to work on. That is what is meant by "Amalgamating Projects" and it is quite straightforward in Flare. Here are the steps for amalgamating two projects. You can repeat them for as many projects as you want.
Backup all the projects in case you need to revert to them.
Each project has a Contents folder. The first step is to copy what is in the Contents folder of Project 2 into the Contents folder of Project 1. Do this via Windows Explorer with both projects closed.
Repeat the process with the images folder(s). You can now open Project 1 just to confirm that all the topics can now be seen in Content Explorer. Some images may be missing at this stage. Close the project again as there is some more work to be done.
Find the folder Project\TOCs in Project 2 and open the toc file in a text editor. Find the tags <CatapultToc Version="1"> and </CatapultToc> and select everything in between, then copy that to the clipboard. Find the toc file in Project 1 and find the tag </CatapultToc>. Paste the clipboard contents on a new line in front of that. Save the file and open Project 1 in Flare. Open the TOC and it should be the combination of the two TOCs. You can rearrange things in Flare if required.
Nothing to be done here. All index words are stored in the topics so the index rebuilds itself. The first time you open Flare after amalgamating you may find it takes longer than usual while it rebuilds the index. There is a message displayed to tell you the index is being rebuilt.
This is similar to the TOC procedure.
Find the folder Project\Advanced in Project 2 and open the browse sequence file in a text editor. Find the tags <CatapultToc Version="1"> and </CatapultToc> and select everything in between, then copy that to the clipboard. Find the browse sequence file in Project 1 and find the tag </CatapultToc>. Paste the clipboard contents on a new line in front of that. Save the file and open Project 1 in Flare. Open the Browse Sequences and it should be the combination of the two. You can rearrange things in Flare if required.
If your browse sequences exactly mirror your TOC, you can save the .fltoc with the extenstion .flbrs. Save the file in the Advanced folder and it will work as your browse sequence. Even if there are differences, this can save time if they are minimal. Follow this procedure and then make the small changes in Flare.
This is also similar to the TOC procedure.
Find the folder Project \ Glossaries in Project 2 and open the glossary file in a text editor. Find the tags <CatapultGlossary> and </CatapultGlossary> and select everything in between, then copy that to the clipboard. Find the glossary file in Project 1 and find the tag </CatapultGlossary>. Paste the clipboard contents on a new line in front of that. Save the file and open Project 1 in Flare. Open the Glossary and it should be the combination of the two. You can rearrange things in Flare if required.
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Changes to this page |
| 25 Feb 2006 | New topic. |