By defining conditional content generation within your topics, you can easily generate multiple variations of your documentation for various clients, licenses, version, kinds of users… In addition to conditional topic generation, HelpNDoc provides a great flexibility in generating multiple versions of the same documentation.
We are glad to announce the immediate availability of HelpNDoc 4.1 which can be downloaded and used freely for personal and evaluation purposes. HelpNDoc 4.1 can now conditionally generate topics based on build tags, provides easier library item modification from the topic editor, better live-spell support as well as many other enhancements and bug fixes. Read on to learn more about this update and download the free version of HelpNDoc 4.1 right now
Click the top half of the Generate help button in the Project group of the Home ribbon tab to display the ‘Generate Documentation’ window.
Select the build in the list for which you’d like to view and update tags. If details about the build are not displayed, click Customize.
Click the Included tags tab to view tags associated with that specific build output. Associated tags are checked and the standard tag associated with the build format is grayed out to indicate that it will always be used for that build.
Conditional content generation can be helpful in many ways, here are two:
Multiple outputs: If you publish documentation in several formats, you can generate conditional content to tailor text that is specific to each format. For example, instructions for the use of electronic help are different than scrolling PDF or reading hardcopy. Multiple versions: Rather than maintaining multiple versions of a project to support multiple versions of your product, you can instead maintain one project and use conditional output to generate documentation that is tailored to each version.
Defining these rules is simple; you don’t need to be a programmer. HelpNDoc provides a user-friendly way to define and insert the rules. The rules contain ‘If,’ ‘Else,’ and ‘End’ logic statements that outline the conditions for including specific sections in selected builds. HelpNDoc uses these instructions when generating documentation.
To begin, place your cursor at the location within the topic where you’d like to insert the rule.
Then, click Insert/Edit condition in the Items section of the Insert ribbon tab.
To define conditional generation for a specific topic, you’ll need to assign build tags to that specific topics. HelpNDoc provides default build tags for documentation formats (CHM, HTML, Word, PDF, ePub, Kindle) and you can create your own build tags if needed.
Step 1: Access the build tag menu The “Included in builds” menu is where tags associated with a topic are defined. There are two ways to access this menu.
Thanks to HelpNDoc's powerful conditional generation feature and its amazing build system, it is easier and faster than ever to produce multiple variations of a master documentation. Just imagine writing a complete help file, manual, book or documentation and then choosing which parts to include in each final product: you'll begin to understand how powerful this feature can be to provide different variations of your master documentation to multiple clients, customers, partners... Read on to learn how to effectively use HelpNDoc's conditional generation system.