What is conditional content

Conditional content helps organizations to single-source content efficiently to address various documentation purposes and audience needs. In Adobe RoboHelp, you implement conditional content by applying condition tags to your content. Condition tags enable you to generate output with content variations.

Additionally, tag groups help you group multiple related condition tags to provide relevant content to a focus group. You can use tag groups such as audience, platform, product, properties, and other custom groups. For example, use the audience group to provide targetted content to developers, administrators, and so on. Use the platform group to target operating system-related information to appropriate users, such as system requirements for Windows and Mac.

In RoboHelp, you can use condition tags to generate subsets of content from your project as needed. This way, you need not create multiple projects for different output types.

Here are some common scenarios in which you can use condition tags effectively:

• Customize content for output formats

Online documentation often contains elements that are not useful in a printed manual. You can mark these elements using a condition tag, for example, online-only, and exclude them from the printed manual. Alternatively, if your manual is a subset of your online documentation, you can apply a different condition tag, for example, print-only, to the topics and topic content that you want to include in the printed manual. When you generate your project, you can use the print-only or online-only tag as required.

• Target custom content for specific audiences

Sometimes, topics are specific to products, experience levels, or types of users. Using condition tags, you can target such topics for the right audience. This way, the content that an audience receives is relevant and clutter-free. For example, beginners get the content that’s relevant for them and their consumption experience is not suboptimized because of notes and tips that are relevant for advanced users.

• Filter published content based on relevance

Sometimes, all published content may not be relevant to a set of your audience. Using dynamic content filters, you can provide your audience the ability to filter out irrelevant content from the output. For example, in a multi-locale travelogue, users can quickly filter content for specific locales, instead of having to read through or search the entire travelogue.

High-level workflows

The end-to-end implementation of conditional content involves performing steps in both authoring and publishing workflows. Also, you can optimize and manage your conditional content.

1. Authoring workflow
2. Publishing workflow
3. Optimize and manage conditional content

Authoring workflow

Publishing workflow

Optimize and manage conditional content