Generating and Publishing, Publishing and Generating. They are both RoboHelp commands you will use while developing your Help project. Many people confuse the two commands. Let’s clear things up…
Generating
While working in your RoboHelp project, you use the Generate command to output your finished Help project. Depending on your end user, you can elect to Generate any of the following layouts (there are more layout types than those listed below, but these are the most popular):
- HTML Help
- WebHelp
- WebHelp Pro
- FlashHelp
- FlashHelp Pro
When Generating, your project will, by default, be generated into the SSL (Single Source Layouts) folder, a folder that resides inside your project folder. After Generating, you will end up with a different folder for each layout you Generate from the list above. For instance, if you set WebHelp as your Primary Layout and Generate, you will end up with a WebHelp folder inside the project’s SSL folder. Later, if you change your Primary Layout to FlashHelp and Generate, you will end up with a FlashHelp folder inside the SSL folder.
Generating is a process you should repeat every time you make a change to your project, no matter how small the change. Should you fail to Regenerate your project, your users would not see your updated content.
Publishing
While Generating your project is mandatory if you want to output your files, Publishing your generated project files is optional.
If you have generated your project into the SSL folder, your next challenge will be to get the generated project files into the hands of your customers or users.
You can copy and paste your generated output files to a server and, assuming users know the address of the Help system’s start page, you would be finished. The problem with copying and pasting the output files into a final destination is that you’ll have to replace all of the files every time you update the Help system.
As an alternative to manually copying the output files into a final location, you can Publish the output files to a server right from your computer. Once you have published the project, you can elect to re-publish the entire project each time you make a change and have regenerated, or you can publish only the files that are newer or different than the last time the files were generated.
Since Generating and Publishing are completely different processes, never Publish your finished output files into the SSL folder (which is where output files are Generated by default).
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