Accessibility
Rick Stone

Rick Stone

www.RoboWizard.com

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Improvements offered by Adobe RoboHelp 6
  3. Deciding what to do first
  4. Creating the tags
  5. Previewing the content
  6. Pulling it all together
Created:
15 January 2007
User Level:
Intermediate
Products:
RoboHelp HTML 6

Using the Conditional Build Tags feature in RoboHelp HTML 6

Adobe RoboHelp is sometimes disliked by certain segments of the technical writing profession. I often wonder if this is simply because it's so darn easy to use. One way it makes life easy for help developers is by offering the capability to maintain a single set of source files and produce an infinite variety of outputs based on that same set. The buzzword I've seen folks use to describe this is "single-sourcing." One really useful feature of RoboHelp has always been the ability to accomplish this using something called "Conditional Build Tags."

The ability to flag content using tags and create customized outputs based on build expressions has long existed within RoboHelp HTML. This feature was introduced in September 1999 with RoboHelp HTML version 2000. The feature was left alone until version X3. In September 2002, RoboHelp HTML version X3 arrived. At that time, the functionality was expanded to allow the selection of individual objects inside content. With the X3 release, you had the ability to exclude images, specific paragraphs, sentences, words or even letters from the build.

Adobe RoboHelp 6 offers some impressive enhancements to the Conditional Build Tag functionality. This is exciting news and should be very well received. This article explains the improvements that have been added and guides you on how to use them. This article assumes you are a RoboHelp beginner with little knowledge about the actual process involved with using Conditional Build Tags. The only prerequisite is a basic understanding of how to use RoboHelp HTML to author basic content. Additionally, I've provided a sample project that you can download and open so that you can see firsthand what was used during the construction of this article.

Requirements

In order to make the most of this article, you need the following software and files:

RoboHelp 6 (RoboHelp X3 or newer may be used but will not have capability for tagging Folders, Index terms or TOC Items)

Sample files:

Prerequisite knowledge:

Basic comfort level with using RoboHelp HTML to manipulate content.

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About the author

Rick Stone has been using RoboHelp since 1992 and has created hundreds of projects ranging from WinHelp, HTML Help, WebHelp, and FlashHelp.