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

[Avraham Makeler]

The penny just dropped ... I noticed that you did not recommend (or even
suggest) making them into book and using Conditional Text, even the Set #2
which has the books (four) having about only 10% identical content.
Why, may I ask, did you not recommend Conditional Text?

avraham



On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 5:01 PM, Art Campbell <art.campbell at gmail.com>wrote:

> Replies cut in below...
>
> 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.
>