If you are fortunate enough to be attending the STC Summit in Sacramento this year, please stop by the Adobe booth to say “Hi”

I’ll also be presenting an STC conference session on using Adobe products to create ePub and apps from your FrameMaker and RoboHelp content.

When processing linked FrameMaker 9 files, RH 8.02 seems to put underscores under some, but not all of the topic titles generated from the headings in a FrameMaker file.

This isn’t a huge problem, until you use the Search capability in your Help output. Since the Topic Title is what is displayed in the search results, the end product is in need of a little polish.

Further, for topics created from linked FrameMaker 9 files, the Topic Title is not editable from the Topic Properties. If it was, at least I could change the offending titles prior to final generation of output. (though the titles would revert on the next update of the FrameMaker source content)

RoboHelp has a great FrameMaker document linking feature…except for a few hiccups.

While it’s fairly common to place cross references or hypertext markers (like links to email or to roundpeg.com) in the middle of paragraphs, the resulting processed RoboHelp topics give unexpected results.

If the following sentence in a FrameMaker 9 document

See roundpeg.com for more info.

where

• a Frame Character style,  FMLink has been applied to roundpeg.com
• a valid hypertext marker has been placed in the middle of roundpeg.com

is processed into RoboHelp, and the

• FMLink character style is mapped to a CSS style called RHLink

will result in the following html:

<p>See <span><a href=”http://roundpeg.com>roundpeg.com</span> for more info</a></p>

 (I typed this from memory, so pardon any html syntax errors)

The result is the link and the underlined text extends to the end of the paragraph 

 The only (weak) workarounds I found are

• to ensure that my <a>’s all exist at the end of paragraphs
• are formatted as bulleted lists
• exist as separate entries in table cells (with no text after link)

Anyone know a better solution?

Background on FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and TCS2 Integration

Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite 2 (TCS2) has some amazing integration features. The implementation of these features is much more intuitive and stable than in the initial release of the TCS. 

However, folks (including me) still seem to experience crashes far too often. I suspect that this often has a lot to do with hiccups in opening and updating FM source files (missing fonts, unresolved XREF’s, etc.) 

The next time you crash, go through these steps and you’ll likely be back on track in less than 15 minutes, with a stable system to boot! 

Linked Frame file checklist

If I’ve missed anything, or if you disagree with the steps below, please comment & help to make this a more complete list! 

I see 2 things that seem to increase the # of crashes: 

1. If your FM book and all chapters are not open and freshly updated, RH seems to choke on it more often. This means all missing resources (fonts, graphics, xrefs) should be resolved such that the book updates without any errors or dialogs.
2. Intial mapping of styles, and their first application to the content. I can’t prove this, but it seems that the noodling of the mappings can affect the odds of that first conversion.

So how to stop it?? 

1. When mapping FM styles to the RH equivalents, you can export the .isf after you do mappings, but before you apply settings. Then, if you have a crash, you can quickly import the .isf back into the project.
2. If your project crashes after restarting your computer
   • Crashing on opening- Delete the .cpd cache file and re-open
   • Repeated crashing when Update All is invoked-
     1. Update individual chapters in book, then Update All (then, if that doesn’t solve it)
     2. Create new project
        • Import FM book again, opening and updating all files as noted above
        • Import .isf
        • Update All by right-clicking on the FrameMaker book file within RoboHelp in your Project Files pod
     3. Consider creating a new RH project, and importing a new “dummy” FM file with only a few paras and headings to verify that the software is working properly

**Addendum: Both Ashish Gupta and our Aussie pal Mark at tcs-users@googlegroups.com noted that the RoboHelp 8.02 update seem to crash their systems. Uninstalling just the 8.02 patch may provide some relief on some systems.  

 Let me know if this works for you! 

-Matt

Overview of RoboHelp workflow

Explore interface

Create new project

Add content

Not being an html code jockey by nature, I often forget the details of html and the ways that I ultimately solve my code problems.
Case in point:
Question-What’s the html needed to set up a link that generates an email with a pre-populated subject line?
Answer-found at http://www.askdavetaylor.com/can_i_have_a_mailto_link_specify_a_subject_and_body.html

I like his business model…he answers questions, politely asks for a $5 donation (Buy Dave a cuppa coffee) from those who post questions, and is straightforward in why he does this and the answers he gives.

I must admit I’ve not yet asked a question, nor bought him a cuppa coffee, but I have been helped by his archives a few times, and thus the least I can do is…

For the past few years I’ve represented Adobe at various Tech Comm conferences, including the last 2 STC Summits. In discussing options for FrameMaker to RoboHelp integration, I developed a “chalk-talk” that usually took about 15 minutes to draw out and explain. The end result looked something like this:

Available inputs and outputs using Frame and RoboHelp

In the diagram above, the solid lines represent inputs for both applications, while the broken lines represent traditional outputs. In some cases, like PDF output, there are overlaps between the capabilities of the two applications, where you can choose between the strengths of each application. 

As one person observed, “It looks like 2 spiders mating”

While I can’t really argue that point,  what I see instead is a blueprint for  managing content using FrameMaker.

Now, when I give out this same info, I can just cross out the elements that a client might not be interested in, and give them the same perspective in less than 1/2 the time.

 Most folks expect this process to be really involved, and to be both expensive and stressful. In reality, it takes only a few hours to map out the FrameMaker formatting into RoboHelp, and then another few hours to work out the formatting bugaboos in HTML and CSS, and to define your single source layouts in RoboHelp.

The first time through the process can have a learning curve, so plan on either seeking services or education from a training provider like roundpeg, or invest some time in online tutorials like those from RJ Jacquez at http://blogs.adobe.com/rjacquez/2009/05/linking_framemaker_9_books_in.html 

Either can make the process both rapid and pain-free.

When you’ll be creating more than one RoboHelp project, either maintained directly in RoboHelp or with content linked from FrameMaker and other sources, consider keeping a CSS with a separate name other than default.css or RHStylemapping.css for use in your projects. A separate custom CSS will allow you to, among other things, put in code that addresses limitations or omissions in the standard CSS files (see http://wp.me/pKaGh-K)

When your custom CSS has a custom name, it will be easier to avoid confusion than if you simply overwrite one of the default CSS.

When linking FrameMaker 9 to RoboHelp 8 projects using TCS2, you may get frustrated at the (lack of) control over the size, font, and other properties associated with the autonumbered lists.

Often I hear folks erroneously blame this on the mapping from FM to RH. The mapping actually produces quite clean HTML, but there is a CSS issue that you must also address.

Here’s a quick fix, using the <body> tag to apply global formatting defaults:

In a text or css editor (I use Dreamweaver) open your conversion CSS (by default, it’s RHStyleMapping.css in your RoboHelp project directory) and add the following entry at the top:

body {
 font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
 font-size: 8.5pt;
}

Of course, feel free to edit the properties applied or adjust their values to suit your project.

Because nearly everything in your converted file will use a specific mapping to a CSS element, the values specified will become your “base” values, overridden by the other definitions in your CSS. Only when there are no rules defined to format content will you see the <body> values applied.

Matthew Ellison has written an in-depth review of 10 popular screen capture utilities. The link is at http://www.writersua.com/articles/capturetools/index.html