Conditions and Single-Sourcing

Single-sourcing means to produce multiple results from one source. In Flare, you can make use of single-sourcing in many different ways.

One way to single-source content is to take advantage of multiple output formats and condition tags. How does it work? Each target in your project is a potential output (using a specific output format, such as HTML5 or PDF). You can create and apply condition tags to content. Then you associate the condition tags to your different targets as necessary, so that some content appears in some targets but not in other targets. This way, you do not need to create a separate project for each output that you want to produce. If most of the content for your outputs is similar, there is no need to rewrite it in another project. Simply specify which sections to include or exclude in which targets through the use of condition tags. This is one reason that topic-based authoring is so appealing. By placing condition tags on individual topic files themselves, you can pick and choose which topics to include in some outputs and which to include in other outputs.

Example You need to create two PDFs from your project—one for beginning users and another for advanced users. Rather than creating two separate projects, you can put all of the content into a single project.

Then you can create one condition tag called "Beginner Manual" and another condition tag called "Advanced Manual."

After that, you can apply the "Beginner Manual" condition tag to the content that belongs only in the manual for beginners, and you can apply the "Advanced Manual" condition tag to the content that belongs only in the manual for advanced users.

Finally, you open one PDF target and tell Flare to include the "Beginner Manual" condition tag and exclude the "Advanced Manual" condition tag. In the other PDF target, you do the opposite; exclude the "Beginner Manual" condition tag and include the "Advanced Manual" condition tag.