There are several different approaches, these are a few of my favorites:
- if chapter-level content stays together, you can create different book
files for each UM or QG and insert the relevant files as necessary
- a more granular approach is to use text-insets; create text-insets for
content that is used in more than one place. insert the text-inset
by reference where necessary
-Huntley
On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 12:41 PM, Alison Craig
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Version: FM9 (9.0p237)
> OS: XP Pro with SP3
>
> Caveat: I've only been using FM for about 6 or 7 months and I am a
> documentation department of 1.
>
> We've just released our first User Manuals (UMs) in FrameMaker.
>
> Before applying any conditions, I had an up front discussion with my boss and
> his boss about deciding on conditions BEFORE implementation as it is a lot
> more work to monkey around with them later. We decided that we would combine
> four UMs in one. Creating conditions for these options was not difficult and
> management was extremely happy they got four manuals in the time it would
> normally take to write 1-1/2 in MS Word.
>
> Now however, the powers that be have decided that "we" also want to create
> Quick Guides (QG) from the same content. The 4 UMs run between 356 and 424
> pages with at least 75% of the content shared between all 4. The thinking is
> that the QGs would be about 50 pages each - a decision reached arbitrarily
> rather than based on what should be included!
>
> I can create new books using the some of same files (the 7 Appendices would
> likely not have any QG content which eliminates 73-93 pages of content), but
> I really don't want to have to conditionalize every bit of content in every
> chapter in order to include only QG material in the QGs. With 75% content
> reuse between UMs that's a lot of text to deal with and a maintenance
> headache.
>
> Is my logic screwy or am I looking at this problem correctly?
>
> Is there a way to spit out a conditional manual that ignores all
> unconditionalized text and only gives you the text you conditionalize?
>
> If anyone has any suggestions on the approach I should take, I would be very
> grateful.
>
> Alison
>
> Alison Craig, Technical Writer
> Ultrasonix Medical Corporation
> Tel: (604) 279-8550, ext 127
> E-mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
>
>
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