This team blog intends to provide interesting and useful info about Technical Communication, FrameMaker, RoboHelp and related issues. Contributors include Vivek Jain, Group Product Manager, Technical Communication products; Akshay Madan, Product Manager, Adobe RoboHelp and Mahesh Kumar Gupta, Product Manager, Adobe FrameMaker.
Adobe RoboHelp 7 and Adobe Technical Communication Suite enable you to convert the FrameMaker paragraph styles with autonumber formats to HTML lists. After import is complete, you can add or delete list items and the numbering of the list items will change accordingly.
a. Style Mapping - You can map the FrameMaker paragraph styles to new styles in RoboHelp and control the indentation and numbering format through the style definition. Through style mapping, you can customize the display as bullet, (a), (i) or 1,2,3.
b. Complex and Nested lists - RoboHelp will convert complex list numbering to a single enumeration, for example, list item with number format 1.1.(a) will be enumerated as (a), preceding 1.1 will be lost. Also, please note that RoboHelp considers the string of building blocks, for example, <n> <n> <a> etc to determine the levels in lists.
Named lists in FrameMaker - At present, RoboHelp does not change the level of lists based on names used in autonumber format in FrameMaker. The solution is to use an empty building block in autonumber format to skip a level. For example, if you are using "A:<n+>." as the autonumber format for level 1 list and "a:<a+>" for level 2 list, change the autonumber format for the level2 list from"a:<a+>" to "a:< > <a+>".
Using building blocks in Autonumber format -If you are using auto-number formats to display numbering like 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and have sub-lists 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, please make sure you are using autonumber format in level 1 paragraph style as "<n>.0" and not "<n><n=0>". If you use the second definition in autonumber format, RoboHelp treats the paragraph style as part of level 2 list.
c. Ignore Autonumber Properties - You can also select to ignore auto-number properties for specific styles. If you choose to ignore auto numbering, the paragraph style will not be mapped to a HTML list in RoboHelp.
If you choose not to "Convert AutoNumber to HTML list", all paragraph styles in FrameMaker will be converted to paragraphs and the numbering, bullets etc will become part of the paragraphs. You can still map FrameMaker styles to RoboHelp styles as mentioned in (a) above.
Adobe Senior Product Evangelist,
RJ Jácquez, has created three On Demand training videos to help customers get started with Adobe Technical Communication Suite. A large number of customers have been asking us for training material on the Suite. I hope you will find this useful. Please see the details below-
In Part 1, you will learn about leveraging live and interactive 3D models from virtual any CAD/CAM/CAE software in your technical and instructional documents using the Adobe Technical Communication Suite. This training video includes all exercise files needed for you to follow along with the presenter, and experience first-hand how to convert a 3D CAD file into a highly compressed 3D PDF document and how the included 3D Toolkit software allows you to reuse this model in FrameMaker and then generate an interactive and rich PDF document, that you can distribute to anyone using the free Adobe Reader. The video also guides you through the steps on how to further polish your 3D models using 3D materials and by adding animation that shows your end-users how to disassemble the model.
In Part 2, you will learn how to supplement your technical and instructional design documents with engaging Adobe Captivate demonstrations, simulations and quizzes in the Flash format using the Adobe Technical Communication Suite. This training video includes all exercise files needed for you to follow along with the presenter and experience first-hand how to create engaging Captivate demonstrations, simulations and quizzes that can be imported into FrameMaker documents and saved as PDF files, that end-users can playback using the free Adobe Reader. The video also guides you through the steps needed to add a printing poster in FrameMaker and how to generate a single .SWF file from Captivate, which includes the playback bar in the PDF file, as well as other best practices.
In Part 3, you will learn about adding FrameMaker books and documents in RoboHelp as live links and reusing FrameMaker content for creating Online Help systems, Searchable Knowledge bases, Performance Support systems and even Policies and Procedures. Just like the first two, the exercise files are also included in case you want to go over the integration features yourself.
Besides Adobe Technical Communication Suite, there are training videos for Adobe FrameMaker 8 and Adobe RoboHelp 7 available on Help Resource Center. Adobe Certified Trainers (for example, John Daigle is a certified trainer for RoboHelp and Captivate) can help you with formal training, if required. If you are looking for formal training, you can locate Adobe Authorized Trainers in your area from Adobe site.
With Adobe Technical Communication Suite and RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR (free download), you can now generate Adobe AIR output when you are authoring documents in FrameMaker. As part of Adobe Techncial Communication Suite, you can add FrameMaker documents and books as live links in RoboHelp and generate WebHelp output from RoboHelp. RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR enables you to generate Adobe AIR output from the WebHelp output. Adobe AIR output comes with several advantages - please check out Adobe Labs page for more details.
Generating Online Help for DITA content
If you are authoring in DITA, it is easy to convert the DITAMap file into a FrameMaker book or a FrameMaker document (see DITA menu in FrameMaker 8 below) and generate the HTML help using RoboHelp. If you update your DITA topics later, you can re-generate the FrameMaker document and RoboHelp will allow you to generate Online Help in two clicks (Update and Publish).
Another alternative for publishing DITA content to RoboHelp is to (a) create HTML files through DITA Open toolkit, (b) bring these HTML files in RoboHelp and (c) run publish/generate commands. RoboHelp also supports command line compile and publish. For generating overnight builds, you can run a batch command to download the source files from source control system, compile and publish the output.
Do you have a custom help viewer for cross-platform applications?
Online Help using Adobe AIR is an attractive alternative for cross-platform applications. Over the last month, I met several customers who write custom help viewers to support online help for cross-platform applications. This requires additional cost of creating and maintaining the helpviewer application. Helpviewer is not a simple application, it requires functionality for creating mini-TOC, breadcrumbs, browse sequences, support for skins or templates, support for PDF, SWF and other dynamic content and search functionality for multiple languages. If you are planning to add Web 2.0 features, there is additional effort required to create a commenting infrastructure. With Adobe AIR and RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR, you now have an easy out of the box cross-platform option available to you.
FYI- Adobe AIR for Linux (alpha) is now available on Adobe Labs.
You can create custom filenames for topics in RoboHelp, when you add FrameMaker documents to RoboHelp as live link. You don't need to use filename markers in FrameMaker. Since RoboHelp supports conditional tags and imports the text in FrameMaker which has conditional text setting applied, the same workflow can be created using conditional text. This solution relies on the fact that RoboHelp creates topic names based on the text of the style you paginate on.
1. Please add the specific file names (say, FileName1, FileName2, FileName3, FileName4) just before the topic headings in FrameMaker which correspond to these dialog names.
2. Assign a unique style to these names (say, "FrameMakerFileNameStyle").
3. Apply a conditional text to these names in FrameMaker (say, "FileNameTag").
4. Add another style in RoboHelp (say"RoboHelpFileNameStyle").
5. Map the FrameMaker style "FrameMakerFileNameStyle" to RoboHelp style "RoboHelpFileNameStyle". You can map the remaining styles as you had done earlier. No change is required.
6. Select "RoboHelpFileNameStyle" as the style to paginate on (instead of Heading 1 or Heading 2).
7. Also, select to create a TOC based on FrameMaker TOC which uses Heading1 or Heading2 styles in FrameMaker. Note that
filenames are not same as the TOC entries, RoboHelp project explorer will list topics by filename. However, if you have a hierarchical TOC in FrameMaker (using styles Heading1, Heading2, Heading3) etc, RoboHelp will convert the TOC and maintain hierarchy.
8. Select "paratext_no_num" as the option for topic name pattern. This option asks RoboHelp to generate filenames based on the text of the style you paginate on and remove the autonumbering from the text.
Please click on Continue to view the Captivate demo below.
On Import of content in RoboHelp,
1. RoboHelp creates a TOC which mirrors FrameMaker TOC (the additional text is not reflected here)
2. RoboHelp creates filenames based on the text added (for example, FileName1, FileName2, FileName3, FileName4 etc.)
3. RoboHelp shows the custom filenames (FileName1, FileName2, FileName3, FileName4 etc.) as part of each topic with conditional text (FileNameTag) applied.
4. In the SSL, exclude the conditional text "FileNameTag" and generate output. You get your TOC, topics are also displayed fine without the additional text.
Please click on Continue to view the Captivate demo below.
As you all know, RoboHelp experienced some turbulent times in the past while it was with Macromedia. I believe RoboHelp was declared “Dead” in one of the WritersUA conference. This led some of RoboHelp customers to migrate to other products and most importantly MadCap Flare as it was positioned as a replacement for RoboHelp. But as soon as Adobe got hold of RoboHelp and Captivate, things changed. We could clearly see we had all the products (FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate and Acrobat) that a Technical Communicator would ever need and hence that led to creation of a brand new Suite – AdobeTechnical Communication Suite. Since Adobe RoboHelp is one of the main applications in this suite, we have invested heavily in the same and have released two versions of the same. The last version – Adobe RoboHelp 7 is considered as the biggest release in the history of the product.
While we were developing products and gearing up for the Technical Communication suite, we attended a number of conferences and met a number of Technical Communicators – the actual users of the products. One of the biggest requests that we heard from a small community was a migration path back from Flare to RoboHelp. This community includes those who were early adopters of MadCap Flare and had made a change of the Authoring tool while there were fears of RoboHelp being “Dead”. We wanted to help these customers come back to RoboHelp, but at the same time we did not want to invest in writing this piece of code as it was targeted at a very small community. We also did a survey and posted a blog to gauge interest and size of this community (refer blog posted by Vivek Jain - Migrating from Flare to RoboHelp). We found that this community was not growing as the migration had stopped as we succeeded in establishing faith back in RoboHelp by releasing Adobe RoboHelp 6 back in January 2007. All of this led us not to invest in this space.
However, John Daigle of Evergreen Online Learning, LLC has worked on a utility that can help this small community of customers (existing Flare users who want to come back RoboHelp). It is available free of cost and can be downloaded by filling just 6 form entries. You can get one from here - http://www.showmethedemo.com/flare-to-robohelp/flare-to-robohelp.htm.
Though John did apprise me that he was working on a utility and asked me to answer some simple questions from time to time, but I never asked and he never shared what exactly he was doing. But when I saw this working today, I was completely amazed at how easy, simple and fast it is. So if you are a Flare customer and want to convert your project to a RoboHelp, all you need to do is, download the converter utility (1 minute job) and specify the Flare project that you want to convert and provide a name of the new RoboHelp project and press OK (another 1 minutes) and you are done. Double click the RoboHelp project (the .xpj file) and you are up and running. If that was not enough, he has another gift for you - he is providing the source code of this utility to the end customers under Common Public License again free of cost.
I will now be able to greet Long Beach and STC Minneapolis customers who had asked for a migration path with a smile on my face – Welcome BACK to RoboHelp. And this won’t have happened without John’s initiative. I personally thank John for investing in this converter business and working for the RoboHelp Community.
RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR (Beta) provides two skins (a) Multi-Tab Accordion and UniPane. Each of these skins comes with several themes (color schemes) to choose from. In this post, I share a few screenshots of a Customer Care project (one of the sample projects which is part of Adobe RoboHelp 7) published using Multi-Tab Accordion skin.
You can now open more than one tab in the help. At times you have more than two topics which are of interest and you want to open both of them (from search results or from the TOC menu). However, CHM or WebHelp don't provide an ability to open multiple tabs in the same help window. In the screenshot below, you may also notice the mini-TOC to the right side of the content window. Also note that text of the content pane automatically reflows to adjust for the mini-TOC. Thus, mini-TOC is not hiding any of the content.
You can also add comments to the bottom of each page (see below). Comments are at present stored in the local repository on the client machine.
You can also add favorites - please see the Favorites tab at the bottom of the left pane (see below).
On the top right hand corner, you can list resources (for example, corporate web site, support forum link etc.). If you will want to see how your project looks in Adobe AIR, please download the Beta from Adobe Labs.
I was short on time when I wrote my previous post and hence did not mention the exact list of issues that have been resolved in the recent update to Adobe RoboHelp 7. I thought that getting out the message was much more important than describing the issues. Today, I will improve upon that by listing down all the issues fixed in Adobe RoboHelp 7.0.1 (when you apply the Update the version number changes from 7 to 7.0.1)
Rather than writing out the issues myself, I thought it might be more accurate to just Cut and Paste contents from the "Read Me" itself. So here is the list of issues:
Search does not work properly in CHM output generated in complex asian languages.
When an X5 Project is upgraded to RoboHelp 7.0 some topics may remain empty in certain scenarios.
Browse sequence doesn’t get auto generated via TOC on importing complex Frame maker file.
If style sheet is accessed by clicking Format | Styles, then after style sheet creation changes to the styles could not be made successfully in the first attempt. The dialog has to be reopened to make changes.
Any formatting changes to a paragraph could not be saved as a paragraph style on the fly using Formatting toolbar.
Search does not work properly in CHM output generated in few languages.
When an X5 project is upgraded to RoboHelp 7.0 topic files-names might get converted to Title Case.
Images with Text wrapping applied do not appear in Printed Documentation output.
DHTML effects applied on styles do not get automatically updated without opening the topic.
Security vulnerability related to cross-site scripting attacks in WebHelp and FlashHelp Single Source Layouts has been fixed.
Frame Maker style with DHTML effects when mapped to a RoboHelp style do not retain DHTML effects on mapping.
While renaming a Snippet or a UDV, the Topics opened in the editor may get saved without a prompt.
While viewing content in Mozilla Firefox, some of the TOC Books may not open until any topic is opened manually. Additionally the default topic is not shown if it is under some book.
In certain scenarios hotspots created on Shed files are missing in the FlashHelp output for RoboHelp for Word.
Conditional Build Tags when applied differently in multiple cells of a table do not appear properly in output.
Previewing of an unsaved topic results in saving the topic without giving any prompt.
HTML topics may not get generated if a structured Frame Maker file is imported or added to a RoboHelp project.
In case of multiple cross reference markers applied to paragraphs each linked to different sources in a FrameMaker file, the hyperlinks are not formed on importing or linking the file to RoboHelp project.
Inserting image with path more than 120 characters do not work properly.
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As mentioned in the list we have also fixed the vulnerability related to cross-site scripting attacks in WebHelp and FlashHelp. You can read more about this on the following Security Bulletin published by Adobe:
With FrameMaker 8, we introduced an ability to track edits in text. The biggest benefit is in the review workflow. As we started planning the documentation for the next version of FrameMaker, it became obvious that track text edits in FrameMaker 8 will be a great time saver for both the teams – the product development team (which reviews the content) and the documentation team (which develops the content). Review is fundamental to ensuring content completeness and accuracy and with incremental development models gaining popularity, content development is also incremental. This increases the importance of managing content changes through milestones.
I am sure a number of FrameMaker customers are already using from this new feature. Do share your feedback.
Note - For details on what is tracked and what is not, please refer to FrameMaker User Guide.
Technical communication goes beyond in-product documentation. Online help, knowledge bases, policies and procedures, regulatory submissions, tutorials, training materials and data sheets are also technical communication. While in-product documentation is mandated by law in many countries, there is a business reason for technical communication which goes beyond meeting the legal requirement.
In general, technical communication serves both internal and external customers. For example, HR and finance departments aim to improve the adoption of its offerings. Employee Share Purchase Program run by an employer can be considered as an offering from HR and finance departments. Employees of the organization are internal customers and documentation of policies and procedures is important for the success of the program.
Most products or services follow a typical adoption cycle – awareness (get customer’s attention), create interest which may lead to a favorable evaluation and hence, a desire to purchase the product. Marketing communication can help in generating awareness and interest, while technical communication plays a strong role in converting this interest into a desire to purchase or use the offering. This is especially important in complex applications or business processes.
If technical communication is effective, more customers understand the offering in shortest possible time and hence, lead to higher sales or adoption. For example,
If you use a Captivate demo to illustrate a workflow, more customers will know how to use the product. In the example of Employee Share Purchase Program, a demonstration of how to log-in to a system, complete the forms, and use the share trading site can increase the subscription to the program.
If a 3D model of an automobile assembly is used (vis-à-vis a screenshot), it is much easier for customers and vendors to comprehend how their product will fit in the assembly.
Products and services which have strong partner networks (trainers, developers, consultants, vendors, channel or technology partners), it is important to have a common shared understanding about the offering and hence, a need for more effective technical communication.
In my opinion, technical communication can drive revenue. What do you think? Please share your opinion.
I am seeing a number of debates happening across support forums and mailing lists about which authoring tool (FrameMaker or RoboHelp) is better suited for a specific purpose. Both RoboHelp and FrameMaker are really powerful authoring tools for technical communication. FrameMaker provides a print WYSIWYG authoring environment and is the best Print and PDF publishing tool. RoboHelp provides an HTML WYSIWYG authoring environment and is the best publishing tool for knowledge bases and online help with support for largest number of output formats. RoboHelp supports Dynamic HTML effects while auto-numbering and cross-references are major strengths of FrameMaker.
Both FrameMaker and RoboHelp provide
strong support for single sourcing including variables, conditional tags and snippets (text insets in FrameMaker),
support for multiple TOCs, indexes, glossaries,
support for tables, images, Captivate demos, Flash, 3D PDFs,
template based authoring,
support for long documents (FrameMaker books often exceed 1,000 pages) and large projects (RoboHelp projects often exceed 1500 topics) and so on.
With Adobe Technical Communication Suite, you don't need to choose between RoboHelp and FrameMaker. You get both of them (with Captivate and Acrobat 3D) at an attractive price. Adobe Technical Communication Suite provides a complete solution for technical communication. Adobe Technical Communication Suite is probably the right product for you, if any of the following holds true -
PDF/print is an important output format for you (need FrameMaker and Acrobat), or
You send documentation for review to subject matter experts, customers and vendors (need Acrobat 3D for PDF based review and commenting workflow along with FrameMaker or RoboHelp), or
You are publishing or planning to publish for multiple channels – PDF or print and online help (need FrameMaker, Acrobat and RoboHelp).
You are using Structured FrameMaker for authoring XML documents and want a more flexible solution than XSL transforms and reduce the cost to customize and manage XSL transforms for every minor change needed in the Online Help output (need FrameMaker and RoboHelp), or
You are authoring in DITA and need a better publishing tool than DITA open toolkit (need FrameMaker, Acrobat and RoboHelp), or
You want to improve the effectiveness of your technical communication by using Flash movies or Adobe Captivate demos to illustrate the workflows (need Captivate along with RoboHelp or FrameMaker), or
You are part of an industry where 3D visualization can substantially improve effectiveness of technical communication, for example, manufacturing - engineering, automobiles, construction, aerospace, real estate and so on (need Acrobat 3D with RoboHelp or FrameMaker), or
You are currently using or will use two or more products from the Suite (FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate and Acrobat 3D).
I certainly believe that above scenarios hold true for most of the technical communicators. In a later post, I will discuss further on this topic.
The year 2007 has been an exciting one and as I look forward to 2008, it promises to be even better. We had 6 product releases in 2007 - Adobe RoboHelp 6 in January, Acrobat 3D ver 8 in May, Adobe Captivate 3 and Adobe FrameMaker 8 in July, Adobe RoboHelp 7 and Adobe Technical Communication Suite in October. The launch of Adobe Technical Communication Suite is a major milestone for us. It brings together the best in class applications and provides an end-to-end solution to all technical communication needs. It is heartening to see the response to the Suite. It is way beyond my expectation! Thank you.
During the last two years, we have expanded our engineering teams for FrameMaker and Captivate and created a new team for RoboHelp. Overall, we have a larger and may I say more experienced and skilled engineering team than anyone else in the business. Both customers and industry experts have acknowledged the impact we have made in the year 2007. FrameMaker 8 has been rated as the biggest release in a decade and we have received similar comments for RoboHelp 7. Captivate 3 surprised everyone with the features it delivered in short period of time. Acrobat 3D continues to create new milestones in innovation - enabling new workflows which no one thought were possible.
Lastly, a big thank you for hundreds of comments, suggestions and personal e-mails we have received. We started this team blog in January 2007. It's almost a year now and I must say that it has been a rewarding experience. Your feedback is valuable and I look forward to continuing this dialog.
1. Importing the TOC and the Index - RoboHelp supports multiple TOCs, Index and Glossary. When you add a FrameMaker book as live link in RoboHelp, you can create a new TOC and a new Index to import the FrameMaker TOC and Index entries. This enables you to manage FrameMaker content separately inside RoboHelp. As a next step, you can add TOC and Index as placeholder in the master project TOC and Index respectively. You should also properly format the TOC in FrameMaker before you import the content in RoboHelp. To remove Auto Numbering from appearing in the TOC entries, please select "Ignore Auto number" during style mapping for those styles which are used to create TOC in FrameMaker. For Index entries, you should use Index Markers in FrameMaker.
2. Defining Content Sensitive Help -For defining context sensitive help, please
choose any custom marker and apply it at the beginning of the paragraphs in the FrameMaker source files.
3. Print and Help Specific Content - You may want to use conditional text to clearly identify the online and print specific content in FrameMaker. In both FrameMaker and RoboHelp, you can define a conditional expression to filter print and online specific content. For example, if you want to use two different image size in Print and Online Help, you may want to include both of them in FrameMaker and apply conditional text to identify which one is for print and help.
4. Style Mapping - RoboHelp enables you to map styles from FrameMaker to RoboHelp. You can map FrameMaker paragraph and character styles to RoboHelp styles, which will automatically reformat your FrameMaker content for publication in RoboHelp. In addition, you can also specify new definitions for FrameMaker cross-reference formats (e.g., to remove page numbers from cross-references in RoboHelp output). If you are using styles to control spacing between text and images, you may chose "Ignore output" for these styles during the mapping. If you want to pass through content in RoboHelp with a user defined tag, you can specify that as project settings in RoboHelp.
You can export and import the style mapping file in RoboHelp and re-use it across projects.
Update (April 16, 2008)-
You can however create dynamic HTML effects like mouse over through style definitions in RoboHelp. For drop down and expanding hotspots, you may want to check-out a workaround posted on Adobe RoboHelp forums (Category- FrameMaker Integration) .
5. Converting Auto Numbering to HTML lists - You can convert auto numbering styles to HTML lists. This is generally preferred if the FrameMaker document does not include complex numbering e.g., multilevel section numbering 1.1.(a).
You can also select specific styles in FrameMaker for which Auto numbering should be ignored. For example, if you have auto numbering defined for FrameMaker styles SectionName and you don't want sections to be converted to HTML lists, please select "Ignore Auto Number" for the style SectionName.
Update - If convert autonumbers to HTML list is selected, please "ignore autonumbering" for FrameMaker styles which are used in the FrameMaker TOC. This is important when you are importing the TOC as defined in FrameMaker. In sequence of processing, autonumbers are converted to HTML lists before RoboHelp generates the TOC.
6. Images - If you have equations or images in FrameMaker, please make sure they are part of an Anchored Frame. RoboHelp can convert the images (including equations) in FrameMaker to PNG, GIF, BMP or JPG and you can define the default format which RoboHelp should use to convert the images from FrameMaker. If you are using PNG, GIF, BMP or JPG in FrameMaker, these formats will be retained and only other formats like TIFF will be changed to the default selected by you. This setting is available in RoboHelp at Tools-> Options -> FrameMaker Documents.
8. Updating RoboHelp Content when FrameMaker document changes - You can update the RoboHelp content with a click of a button when FrameMaker content changes. RoboHelp also provides visual indication if the content is out of synchronization with FrameMaker document.
9. Preserving Content Changes in RoboHelp - To
handle special situations which may require the RoboHelp content to be out of sync from FrameMaker documents either for short duration or for small set of topics, you can preserve content changes in RoboHelp for linked FrameMaker Books.
Adobe RoboHelp 7 has one of the most innovative and powerful feature of single sourcing, support for hierarchical TOC and hierarchical Index. When you bring content from several sources in RoboHelp, RoboHelp enables you to add that content in a specific folder. For example, for a FrameMaker book, RoboHelp creates a master folder at the book level and sub-folders each representing the Chapters in the book.
By enabling multiple TOC, Index and Glossary, RoboHelp allows to manage your content in a separate space. When you update the content in FrameMaker document, the TOC and Index for the linked FrameMaker books are automatically updated.
In RoboHelp 7, you can now add a TOC inside a TOC as a placeholder enabling a hierarchical structure for TOC. Similarly, you can now add an Index inside an Index as placeholder enabling a hierarchical structure for Indices. This is a really powerful functionality for single sourcing.
You can also include 3D models in a Knowledge base and Online Help. As part of Adobe Technical Communication Suite, you get Acrobat 3D and RoboHelp. Acrobat 3D enables you to capture 3D models from several CAD applications and convert the 3D model to a PDF. And you can include the PDF file containing the 3D model as a baggage file in RoboHelp. RoboHelp enables you to publish the PDF along with Online Help or a Knowledge Base.
Please notice the TOC entry in RoboHelp refers to the baggage file.
The FlashHelp output of this simple projects contains the PDF which can be accessed as part of a Knowledge Base and Online Help. Please click on the button to start the Adobe Captivate demo below.
With single sourcing workflow from FrameMaker to RoboHelp for HTML publishing and powerful content aggregation functionality available in RoboHelp, this opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Do explore more and share your experiences.
Though, I had mentioned in my previous post that I would be talking about Translation Workflows, but then I realized that I need to first talk about a new Single Sourcing feature that we have built in Adobe RoboHelp 7 - Multiple TOCs, Indexes and Glossaries.
Now using RoboHelp 7, you can define multiple TOCs, Indexes and Glossaries in a single project. But why would you want to have multiple TOCs in a single project? You can do that for different audiences of the same project - say Standard user and Advanced users or for different output types – say print and Web output or Help for two different flavors of a Project – Basic, Standard, and Professional or for supporting different languages say – English, French, German and Japanese. For achieving single souring in true sense, you need to have multiple TOCs, Indexes and Glossaries.
Since there can be multiple TOCs, Indexes and Glossaries in a single RoboHelp project, we need a mechanism to manage the same. And for this very reason, there is a change in the way TOCs are handled in RoboHelp 7. We have moved all the management to Project Manager. So in case you want to define a new TOC or edit an existing TOC or delete a TOC, you will have to go to the Project Manager and access Multiple Table of Contents folder. Indexes and Glossaries are also managed through Project Manager.
Apart from this, as you are already aware, Adobe RoboHelp 7 supports Multiple Document Interface (MDI), so it allows you to open up multiple TOCs and work across them – copy paste items from one TOC to another etc. This is how the multiple TOCs look like when you open them up in RoboHelp 7.
One important thing to note is that there is a default TOC in every project. The Default as the name signifies is the TOC used when you do not specify a TOC while generating a SSL. You have the ability to use any of the defined TOCs when you generate a SSL.
As you see in the above snapshot, most of the times there is a big overlap in the TOCs. As you see in the snapshot above, there are two TOCs – one for Customer Care executives and one for Mortgage Specialist executives. Since, the knowledge bases for the Mortgage Specialist executives is always a super set of the knowledge base for basic Customer Care executives (As depicted in the snapshot above), if you make a change in the Customer Care TOC, you will be forced to redo the changes in the Mortgage Specialist TOC. RoboHelp 7 provides a yet another Single Sourcing featuring called Place Holder TOC in the new TOC Editor. To achieve single sourcing what we can do is remove the first three folders in the Mortgage Specialist TOC (the ones that correspond to Customer Care TOC) and instead add a TOC Place Holder for Customer Care TOC as shown in the snapshot below.
Now when you generate a SSL using the Mortgage Specialist TOC, the Customer Care TOC Place Holder will get replaced by the actual contents of TOC at the time of generation. You can view TOC Place Holder as a kind of a reference to another TOC that will be picked at the time to final generation.
I hope I made some sense in the above explanation. We can also use TOC Place Holder for aggregating content defined across multiple TOCs. Let’s discuss how we can achieve the same. Suppose there are two authors working on the same Knowledge base – one is responsible for general Customer Care Knowledge base, however the other one is concerned just about the stuff that relates to Mortgage Specialist executives. The goal is t to generate a single master knowledge base which will contain all the topics defined in the RoboHelp project.
To achieve this, what we can do is, ask the first author to work on the Default TOC, i.e. Customer Care and ask the other author to define a new TOC, say Mortgage Specialist. However, this time we will ask him to just add the Mortgage Specialist related stuff to this TOC. Probably the TOC’s will look something like this:
Now for aggregating the two TOCs, you can either define a third TOC with two Place Holders (one for Customer Care and the other one for Mortgage Specialist) or you can add a Place Holder in Customer Care TOC that references to the Mortgage Specialist. The first approach is generally useful when you have a number of TOC Place Holders. So we shall follow the second approach in the demo below:
All the above examples are shown using the Customer Care Sample Project that we ship with Adobe RoboHelp 7. Index and Glossary have similar features and are implemented in the same fashion in Adobe RoboHelp 7. It’s now your turn to start playing with these Single Sourcing features and to see how best you can make use of the same in your real life projects.
I know I have exceeded the limit that an ideal blog post should be but it would be incomplete if I do not mention that RoboHelp 7 also allows you to add User Defined Variables in TOC entries and lets usage of Conditional Build Tags to TOC items (Books, topics etc). All these features put together result in most powerful Single Sourcing capabilities that no other HAT provides at this moment.
So to summarize:
Create as many multiple TOCs, Indexes and Glossaries as you like. They can be given unique names to help manage them.
Copy/Paste editing works across multiple TOC/Index/Glossary.
Aggregate multiple TOCs, Indexes using the Place Holder feature.
Use User Defined Variables while defining the TOC items.
Apply Conditional Build tags on TOC items.
At time of publishing, your custom TOC/Index/Glossary can be chosen on the fly.
Translation workflows are enhanced because you can have a separate TOC/Index/Glossary for each language.
RoboSource Control integration is enabled.
You guessed it correctly, we are now set to talk about Translation Workflows and I shall do that in my next post.
Adobe Technical Communication Suite enables a single sourcing workflow from FrameMaker to RoboHelp for HTML publishing. While it is ideal to maintain all the content in FrameMaker, there are special situations which may require the RoboHelp content to be out of sync from FrameMaker documents either for short duration or for small set of topics. These special situations can relate to project deadlines or project requirements which make the process of maintaining a single source difficult.
Adobe RoboHelp 7, as part of Adobe Technical Communication Suite, provides a new and really powerful functionality of managing this Out of Synchronization behavior. First, it provides a visual indicator the moment there is a change in RoboHelp content for a Linked FrameMaker document. Second, it allows you to select a set of topics which you want to preserve when the content is updated again. Since you can manage this at HTML topic level, you can control this at a granular level. Lastly, you can also delete topics and not regenerate these topics during the next update.
Here is a Captivate demo of this feature (Update - I am adding a "Click to Start" button on the demos - Thanks Rick for your suggestion). Do share your comments and suggestions with me.
In my previous post, I showed how a style can be edited in RoboHelp by editing the style sheet fmstyles.css. After you edit the style, the change is preserved on further updates in RoboHelp for changes in the linked FrameMaker book. In the attached Captivate demo (Update- I have added a "Click to Start" button to the demo), I show how you can create or edit a style in fmstyles.css, map it to a FrameMaker style (which was previously mapped to "Source") and update the content in RoboHelp.
Note - When you make the change in fmstyles.css or style mapping, always use "Force Update" to update the linked content.
FrameMaker 8.0.1 patch is live now. This patch has fixes for several reported problems. The key areas include:
PDF: Text going behind tables, tag structure not correct as per accessibility standards etc.
XML / DITA: Fixes for crashers, handling invalid input, bugs related to Unicode etc. Apart from this, two functionality workflows that we have fixed are:
Enabling round-tripping of user-variables in DITA files
Enabling Track Changes in DITA file
Conditional expressions for Books
Track Text Edits: Crashers, some workflow issues. There are fixes for some Japanese locale specific bugs too.
These bug fixes are in addition to localization, installation, FDK, Server, documentation and Suite features.
These patches are available at the following locations:
Adobe Technical Communication Suite enables a HTML publishing workflow from FrameMaker to RoboHelp. While adding FrameMaker files as live links in RoboHelp, you can map FrameMaker styles to RoboHelp styles. RoboHelp uses a specific style sheet fmstyles.css which can be modified for custom needs.
1. The style information in RoboHelp can also be edited after the content has been imported in RoboHelp. Please make sure you make these style changes in fmstyles.css since all the style sheets in the RoboHelp project for FrameMaker files are derived from this style sheet. If you make changes in this style sheet, all the linked chapters from the FrameMaker book will inherit the change which will be consistently applied across the project.
2. If you want to edit the style information specific to a Chapter (from the FrameMaker book), you may want to create a style in FrameMaker for that Chapter. By creating a unique style specific to that Chapter, you can now map this style to any RoboHelp style. If needed, you can also add styles in fmstyles.css. The style sheet can be edited using RoboHelp User Interface.
I am including a Captivate demo of how you can edit style information for linked FrameMaker files (Update- I have added a "Click to Start" button to the demo). I hope you will find this useful. Please let me know your comments.
I have been talking about various features and settings for linking FrameMaker documents in RoboHelp. Today, I’ll take you through the functionality offered when the linking of files is already done. Yes, let’s see how you can update these files.
If you want to change some of the settings you specified at the time of linking files, right-click on the linked file and select ‘Properties’.
‘FrameMaker Document Settings’ Dialog opens up. All the setting dialogs which were seen during the initial linking can be seen as tabs here.
You can choose to update a particular chapter by changing the settings for that particular chapter or you can update the settings for the whole book (right click the book icon and then change properties).
Once settings are changed, the icon changes to red representing an internal un-synchronization.
As can be seen below, if properties are changed for the whole book, all child level entries too get unsynchronized.
Right-clicking an icon gives the update options. Just choose whether you want a simple Update or Force Update. One the selection is made, RoboHelp will quickly update your files taking care of your updated settings!
Table of Contents (TOC) is an important part of FrameMaker books. RoboHelp recognizes this importance and allows the conversion of your source FrameMaker TOC to the corresponding TOC in RoboHelp.
I’ll explain the steps with an example. At the time of importing/linking FrameMaker book,
1. Place a check in the ‘ConvertFrameMaker Table of Contents’ box in the Content Settings dialog.
2. Click to open the Browse FrameMaker file dialog.
3. Navigate to the source files folder, select the source TOC and click ‘Open’. By Default, the TOC path would be populated with the first TOC file in the book. If your book has multiple TOCs, you can choose the one of your interest.
4. Select the Create new associated TOC radio button. This will create a RoboHelp TOC for the imported FrameMaker topics.
5. Enter a name for the this TOC. For our example, I have called it ‘TOC1’.
On completion of the import process, ‘TOC1’ would be created under ‘Table of Contents’ folder in the ‘Project Manager’ pod as shown below.
Double clicking ‘TOC1’ would open the TOC.
Snap-shot of the source TOC is shown below. We see that ‘Filter By Attribute’ is a book in the RoboHelp TOC. Topics under this book are same and in the same order as in the source TOC.
The styles in your FrameMaker TOC determine which headings become books, sub-books, or pages in the RoboHelp TOC. These levels are based on the following elements in the decreasing order of priority:
Left-most indent
Font Size
Font Weight
Note: Headings with indented items are converted to book entries.
In Adobe RoboHelp 7, a project can have multiple TOCs, multiple indexes and multiple glossaries. In addition to creating multiple TOCs and indexes, RoboHelp also provides an ability to create a hierarchical structure of TOCs and indexes. For more information, please visit my following blog post
