Merging books: Need FM mechanisms and methodologies for merging books with large fraction of identical material

[Art Campbell]

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Art Campbell
               art.campbell at gmail.com
  "... In my opinion, there's nothing in this world beats a '52
Vincent and a redheaded girl." -- Richard Thompson
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                                                               DoD 358



On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 10:54 AM, Avraham Makeler <amakeler at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks, Art.
> (a) So you would use the same method for both Set #1 and Set #2?

I think so; the only real difference seems to be the amount of shared info.
I might change my mind if I had the files to look at and play with, but....

> (b) re: \Shared - You make \Shared contain FM files only?

Yes, that's the way I do it. Very rarely there are text files to
include, but what other files (not including graphics) would you
include?

> (c) re: \Graphics - Often many graphics are not shared. So I suppose in that
> case you would have a 'Shared Graphics' folder, but also a
> separate \Graphics folder for each book.

You could certainly do it that way. I'm not sure that I would because
there's no way to know how many graphics are reused and how many are
in the \Shared files. You don't want a graphic in a \Shared file to be
buried in a book subdirectory.

I've found it easier to lump all graphics together so that when one
needs to be changed, it ripples automatically no matter where or how
many times it's used. YMMV.

> (d)
>>> I'd guesstimate a day per book for conversion, but that's a
> WAG. Could easily be half that or twice that, depending on how the
> books are set up and how fast you are.
> - Well, I have never done it before.
> - So a reasonable estimate for a set with two books is that it could take
> two days?
If you're going to take it all the way to building new books with the
shared content, that are ready to go out the door, yes, easily.