More Advanced Procedures > Conditions and Customized Output

There are many situations where you may want to generate different output versions of your projects with different content. You might need different versions of your help for light and professional versions of a program, or specific products might have different names in different versions.

It is also often necessary to change your content to adapt it to the output format – for example, things that you can write in the electronic HTML Help version of the help might not make sense or might need to be expressed or formatted differently in the PDF print version.

Include options

Help & Manual supports conditions called "include options" that give you very fine control over what you include and exclude in your output. You can "tag" text, individual words or entire topics and chapters with these options and the tagged items are only included in the output if the condition evaluates as true when you compile. There are two types of include options:

Format-based include options:

These include options are predefined. They correspond to the output formats supported by Help & Manual. For example, if you tag an item with the HTML Help option that item will only be included when you compile to HTML Help.

User-defined include options:

These include options are conditions that you define yourself. You can define as many of them as you want. You can tag text and topics with them in exactly the same way as with the format-based options.

You select the include options (both format-based and user-defined) you want to apply when you compile your project, in the Compile Help File dialog. If you select a user-defined include option in this dialog all items in your project tagged with that option will be included in the output.

Other conditional output features

In addition to include options you can also control and vary your output with variables, HTML template conditions and modular projects. For more background information see the Variables & Conditional Output chapter in the reference section.