How to display different languages on the fly

Question

I'm using RoboHelp 11 to generate WebHelp that includes a ToC, glossary, index, and page-level context-sensitive help.

We currently offer it in English only, but there is a new requirement to provide it in 4 or 5 different languages (all supported by RoboHelp 11).

The software team is asking whether we can display the different help sets (French, Japanese, etc.) based on the browser's language settings or something passed to it by our web application.

The specific questions are:

Can RoboHelp automatically determine the language from browser settings?

Or can RoboHelp accept arbitrary parameters in the URL and analyze them?

Or maybe RoboHelp already has a built-in mechanism to accept a call with a URL which contains a predefined param for defining the language

Thanks!

Christina

Willam van Weelden · Accepted Answer

Content Categories? That will be an interesting project...

What I normally advise for lots of languages or a lot of projects, is to create a custom landing page. You send users to this file with all the parameters required: topic ID, required manual, language, etc.

This file will process the parameters and any browser settings you might need. Based on that, it redirects to the correct help system.

For RoboHelp, you will just be publishing a lot of different outputs and languages. The landing page will do all the heavy lifting. And you can change the backend without any impact to the landing page.

Captiv8r · Answer

Hi thereTo my knowledge, there is absolutely nothing in RoboHelp that will assist in determining the language and taking action on it.RoboHelp certainly allows you to choose a language during the authoring process and output with different settings for different languages, but as far as I'm aware, that's where it ends.Thoughts...If you want this "On The Fly" bit, you could create a massive help system with all languages consolidated into a single project, then employ the Content Categories feature to allow the end user to select the language of choice.As far as self-determining the language based on Browser settings or creating Context-Sensitive Calls, that may be possible but would certainly require some custom coding totally outside the realm of RoboHelp to achieve.Hopefully others will offer better info on this... Rick

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