Can I Reduce the Length of File Names in HTML5 Output

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
February 22, 2023
2 replies
524 views

I'm outputting HTML5 from a large unstructrued Framemaker document. The file names in the output are based on the headings in the Frame doc, some of which are very long. These long file names are causing problems when the HTML5 output is added to the product build. (It would be a significant effort to rename all the long headings at this point and there's no budget for that right now.)

Is there a way to shorten the file names in the output files without breaking all the links in the HTML5 output? The file names don't need to be human-readable. Someone suggested generating UUIDs for the file names, but I have no idea how to do that or if would see that would break all the links.

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thank you.

Responsive HTML5

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Bob_Niland

Community Expert

I would think that these heading also cause messy ToCs.

If it were my problem, I'd be tempted to:

Re-tag all the current problematic headings as, for example, Heading1.full
Create a new Heading1 with shorter text, that's a run-in, very small pt.sz, and a color that is set to invisible to pub via Color Views. It might be necessary for that color def to not be in the toc.fm file.

This way, the ToCs & HTML are built using the short text, but what's visible at the pages is the full text.

G

gimpfamAuthor

Known Participant

Thank you for your suggestions. I've been playing with this today. It's definately outside of my area of expertise, but I've learned a few things. I created new Heading1.full for the longer titles and then changed Heading1 to a run-in header as you suggested. I made Heading 1 invisible and placed it before the Heading1.full titles.

That does seem to create shorter filenames in the help; however, I'm seeing files for both the shorter Heading1 items and longer Heading1.full items in the Output file for the Help. I'm also seeing both the long and short items in the Table of Contents for the Help. When I click on the Heading1 items in the TOC for the Help, it brings up the Heading1.full item. I'm thinking I'm probably not mapping these para tags correctly in my .sts file. Got any advice as to how to do that or if I'm just missing something important? I said to "Exclude" the Heading1s from the output and I mapped the Heading1.full to h1.

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

re: …however, I'm seeing files for both…

That would seem to be a result of what's entered in whatever dialog(s) define the gathered headings. And there may be more than one: one for the traditional ToC:
Edit » Setup Standard Index
and one for the HTML Publish path, which I've not used for production, so can't provide an instant path to.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

I'm surprised your long file & path names haven't caused your links to fail in the output anyway. I ran into that in one project a while ago. I suspect that your only easy option is to run a find-and-replace tool on the output to shorten things up. Is this a brand new set of output?

G

gimpfamAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks for you reply... The links do work now. This is a project I inherited from someone who left and I did not know about this problem until recently. The development team knows about this problem and have been careful to put the output in a top-level directory so the pathnames/file name do not exceed the maximum length. If they put it where they would like to, the pathnames/file names are too long and thing do break. It's a very fragile setup.
Are you suggesting I run a find and replace tool on the content of the output itself or just on the file names? I'm pretty new to HTML5 so I'm just figuring this all out.

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