nonsequential extraction of conditional text

[loou]

I maintain a user guide for a complex multi-workspace software product . The guide contains some "help" type info and some "training" type info. It is written in Framemaker and is relatively complete as a functional guide.

It would be great to expand the current guide into a library of all user and training information, including more training- type info. To some extent this is possible to do, while maintaining the logic of the user/help guide, using conditional text. However, the difficulty comes when extracting the training portion. Training materials would reuse some generic help information, but would need to place this info in a different sequence that the needs of the help system dictate.

I currently use Webworks to generate online versions of the guide. I'm looking for an online- and print-generation tool that can do the same with conditional text AND allow me to re-order the sequence of different conditional versions. I wonder if anyone knows if such a tool is on the market.

 

[chris2002]

I think you can solve your problem with a more adequate use of conditional text.

Copy all help text blocks which are relevant for later use in the training portion into one separate help text file. In this file, portion out the help text blocks into individually usable units and mark each individual unit with a conditional text ID.

Open the user guide and the help text file. Mark the whole text in the help text file, copy it and paste it into the user guide. Immediately undo the pasting. Thus all new conditional text IDs remain copied in the user guide.
Make as many small files out of the help text file as there exist help text units.

Next, wherever you need in the user guide help text units for training purpose, import them as text elements in the appropriate sequence. By enabling/disabling the adequate conditional text IDs in the user guide, the appearance of the imported text elements can be controlled.