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Subject:Conditional text alternative for RoboHELP? From:"Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 7 Mar 2002 10:08:21 -0500
Sue Gallagher wonders: <<One of our writers is editing an HTML Help project
in RoboHELP. It's unknown whether some of the changes that she's making will
appear in the next product release; as a result, she'd like to make these
changes conditional.>>
I don't have any experience with conditional text in Word, but one way to
approach this is to create a checklist of items that must be verified prior
to freezing the docs, then a day or two before the freeze, running down the
list to see what's changed. I've done this manual verification for some help
projects, and though it's not elegant, it works well enough.
You could make the process somewhat more automatic by creating a character
style called "verify" and applying this to all questionable text; then all
you need to do is use the search tool to find all text formatted using this
style.
<<I'm hesitant to suggest using revision tracking directly in Word.>>
Revision tracking works extremely well in Word, even when you're also using
"versioning" (which I don't trust, but hasn't bitten me badly yet). When I
asked techwr-l about whether this function conflicts with RoboHelp in any
way, I only got one reply expressing reservations, and they were using
versioning software that might have conflicted with RoboHelp.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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