This use case looks at the requirement for localizing the cross reference text used in print based outputs.
Acme's requirements
Acme's product documentation uses a number of links between topics. When Acme creates variant topics, it wants to be sure that hyperlinks use the correct reference text when publishing Print outputs to different languages.
Solution: Create a variant of the hyperlink object's template
When publishing, the reference text for the hyperlink objects is taken from the hyperlink's template. The key to this solution is to create a variant of the Hyperlink object template and assign the locale as the variant value. You'll then update the cross reference text in the variant with the localized text.
The benefit of creating a variant for each locale from the template is that you only need to localize the content for that locale once, in the template rather than in every object. During publishing, Author-it swaps the primary Hyperlink object template with the correct variant by using the locale value. As a result, the translated reference text from the variant template is applied to the hyperlinks in that publishing job.
Examples: On the Print tab, your primary template may use the text in English as (see ... on page ...), but when publishing the localized content in French you want the text to be (voir ... à la page ...). In this case, you would create a French variant of the Hyperlink object template and update the text.
Using hyperlinks in your topics
Create the hyperlink in the usual way, making sure that it is based on the "primary" Hyperlink object template; none of your hyperlinks will be based directly on the template variants. In this example, we'll use variants designated as English (the source language), French, German, and Japanese.
Filtering and publishing
During publishing, Author-it resolves any links it finds in the topics. When the link is checked, Author-it identifies that the Hyperlink object template has a variant and uses the localized text in the variant template. When you filter for English the primary template is used, when you filter for French the French variant is used, when you filter for German the German variant is used, and when you filter for Japanese the Japanese variant is used.