Publishing a Book with Sub Books, with Conflicting Variant and Variable Values

[Sara Levy]

Is there a way to publish a master book, with sub books, and somehow have different variable values and variant values set for each sub book?

Thanks

[Eli Har-Even]

No, it isn’t possible.

The sub books take on the variant values you set when you publish the master book.

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[David]

This is the answer I received from Author-it, to the same question:

Lori Bring (Author-it Community) Sep 16 09:26 AM Hi, David, I am just checking in to make sure I answered your question. Here is my original reply---just in case: You are correct, subbooks only considered containers and are therefore their properties are ignored at publishing. Unless you are publishing a subbook alone everything the properties, including variables set at the subbook will be ignored. Therefore, you will need to set variables at the main book level. Please let me know if you have any other questions. Best regards, Lori

[Michael Sedley]

Although there is no way to have different variable values in sub-books, the work-around that I use is to use snippets for the text that was shared between multiple books.

The structure I have is that each chapter in the master book is a separate sub-book.

There are 2 very similar dialog boxes in the system, described in 2 different sub-books. The only difference is that some of the field names are different.
If AuthorIt allowed separate variables for each sub-book, I would have set the field names change as variables. As this is not an option, I made most of the text as a snippet, and left only the line containing the field names embedded in the topic.

I.e., the topic looks like this.

Chapter 1 - XYZ
    Intro text
    <Snippet 1>
    Step 4 - Enter a value in the XYZ Field
    <Snippet 2>

Chapter 2 - ABC
    Into Text
    <Snippet 1>
    Step 4 Enter a value in the ABC Field
    <Snippet 2>


This solution is a little but clumsy, and may or may not be suitable for your needs, but it is the best workaround that I came up with

Good luck,


Michael

On 13/11/2014 12:33 PM, Sara Levy wrote:

Is there a way to publish a master book, with sub books, and somehow have different variable values and variant values set for each sub book?

Thanks

[Sara Levy]

Thanks, Michael. You have a different manifestation of the same basic issue. My question concerns whether I can take several existing books that are already richly laden with variant usage, each of which must be published with different variant values, put them all inside a new book, and expect useful content when I publish it.