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Q: Managing one set of help files for multiple products
Subject:Q: Managing one set of help files for multiple products From:ann -dot- firth -at- marcam -dot- com To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com Date:Fri, 5 Nov 1999 09:40:22 -0500
Currently we have one set of help files (generated from .RTF files) for our
product. A new product is being added which is a scaled-down version of the
current product. Of the information that is common to the two products, most can
stay as-is. Some information needs to be edited and some removed.
While under an extremely tight deadline we were able to produce help for the new
product using the existing files. However, there is much we'd like to do to
improve it. We produced the new help by (a) highlighting text not needed and
then running a macro to strip it out and create a new set of files, along with
(b) removing files from CNTs and the batch file used to build the help.
Question: Are there others of you out there, maintaining help for more than one
version of the same product? Are you able to do so with one set of files and
still stay sane (seriously folks)? If anyone is maintaining duplicate file sets,
I'd like to hear from you too, to see how you do it.
Our current tools are: MS Word 7.0 and MS Help Workshop 4.0. We are open to
investigating other tools if they will help simplify our situation.
Please respond to me directly, to reduce the amount of traffic to the list.
Thanks in advance for your help,
Ann Firth
ann -dot- firth -at- marcam -dot- com
