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Participant
April 12, 2024
Question

Refining Search Function Provided for HTM5 Output

  • April 12, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 164 views

I have an HTML Help system created by publishing my Framemaker book file to HTML5. When the Help is created, it has the Search function provided by Adobe. Our customers are finding that the search results are too general/broad. When they enter a term to search on, they often get back a long list of results that they have to wade through, making the Search function somewhat useless. 

 

I have discovered that if they enter multi-word terms surrounded by double quotes, you can target the search results a bit. Is there anything I can do within Framemaker (before I generate the HTML5) to improve or target the search results provided?

 

The development team for our product has suggested that they can provide search functions in the HTML5 files after they are generated, but we were hoping maybe there was something I could do within the source files to provide a better search function. 

 

Please note, I do have an index and that works fine in the Help, but users often just type in the Search box instead of using the index. Thanks in advance! 

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2 replies

Matt-Tech Comm Tools
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 12, 2024

Which layouts are you using? Newer layouts tend to have more and better options.

Also, RoboHelp has frameless layouts not available directly in FrameMaker, so linking to a RoboHelp project and then publishing can extend your options and provide things like type-ahead and context sensitivity in ranked results.

Here's a video I did that talks about the Rh output

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm-Gj5SXbZM&list=PLJL3v-Ayk9rRAtqzeYUMO3hecs1qVgNb1&index=7

 

-Matt Sullivan, FrameMaker Course Creator, Author, Trainer, Consultant
Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 12, 2024

Start with what version of FM you're using. I'm not quite sure I understand what the problem is - are there just not enough keywords in your topics that customers are looking for? Do you need to create synonyms for terms they are looking for hits on? What would your Dev team create out of the generated HTML5 that would be any different from what's already present?