RoboHelp 2019 - Single Sourcing Using Condition Tags

Single sourcing is a method of applying condition tags to topics, content in topics, toc books and pages and index entries so that the tag can be included in a condition expression to exclude it from a chosen output. For example, a single topic could contain additional information only to be seen in certain outputs, perhaps a printed output needs an image not required in online versions. Essentially it means a single project (source) can produce multiple outputs, each with different content. This is done by using Condition Tags.

How do Condition Tags Work?

The concept is best explained using an example. Let's say you are producing a knowledge base for your company with some content that applies to everyone, some applies only US readers, some only applies to UK readers and some only applies to Canadian readers. Also end users must not see each others content. In that scenario Dynamic Content Filtering would not work as they could all see the content for the others. You need to generate separate outputs for each group.

In this example you would create three condition tags labelled US, UK and Canada.

The screenshot shows the default condition tag groups. You can edit their names and add or remove the groups in Project Settings.

Here though Audience suits our purposes so click the + icon, select the group in the dropdown that displays and set the color for it.

When you set the colour for any tag, also set the opacity to low so that the text is still legible.

With the required tags set up, you now create your content. Here two paragraphs have been set up with content for a specific audience.

Simply select the text to which the condition tag is to be applied, right click and select Apply Condition Tags. To apply a tag to a whole paragraph, click in the paragraph and then apply the tag.

In the Preview you can select specific tags to see the effect of using the tags.

In Preview you select a tag to include its content. Keep in mind that when you generate your output, the expression you create there could reverse that.

You can also set a condition at topic level in the Properties

Using Condition Tags in an Expression

In Output > Output Settings, click Condition Expressions, then click the + icon to create an expression.

As you drag tags, by default RoboHelp 2019 will set the tag to be excluded and additional tags will be set to be AND.

Thus if you drag both UK and Canada, by default the expression will be Exclude UK AND Exclude Canada so the output will exclude anything that has the UK or Canada condition tag applied. It will include content that has no tags or other tags.

For other purposes, you can easily change Exclude to Include and you can change AND to OR.

Generating an Output

By using different expressions, you can generate different outputs for different audiences, such as in the example above, or you could apply the Print condition tag to images and then exclude the images from online help but include them in Printed Documentation and so on.

In the Output Presets you can either select the required expression each time you generate or you can create one or more presets and set each one up with a specific expression. In this example you might set up Responsive HTML5 US, Responsive HTML5 UK and Responsive HTML5 Canada.