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Orly5E82
Inspiring
September 5, 2022
Question

Importing FM bullets to Robohelp while preserving source style

  • September 5, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 241 views

HI All, 

I have FM files that I want to migrate to HTML5 (either via the Robohelp or simply to Publish>HTML5).

Most of my settings are fine. 

My problem is with the bulleted text. Since I use the numbering option from the Para Style defs to define my bullets, my bulleted paras (I have 3 to 4 levels of them with various Zapf Dingbats or Wingdig characters) don't come out right. 

I suppose I could change them using a dedicated CSS.

But, since we are now investigating the roundtrip option (where SMEs/Engineers can update the HTML), how can I accomplish this without distorting my source files? 

(I supposed Publish>HTML5 without Robohelp will not allow me to accomplish roundtripping.)

I'd appreciate any ideas you all may have.

Thanks, 

Orly

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 9, 2022

Sorry no one had responded to your post - we suspect there's something flakey going on with the Forum notifications again.
Anyways - I'm a bit confused as to what you are trying to accomplish. Are you taking your content out of FM and moving it all to author in RH? (that's fine - it's a one-time import and maybe some tweaking to get it all over cleanly with the style mappings). Your bulleting would probably come over as an HTML list and then you could apply a multi-level list style to it in RH. Appearance is controlled by the css as you note.
However, I don't get what you mean by roundtripping - once you produce output, you can't mess with it and be able to have those changes appear in the source files (in either RH or FM) without making the same changes in the source files manually. Creating output is mostly a one-way street (I say mostly because review PDFs in FM do allow for changes to get back into your FM files - I can't recall if RH ever added that function).
If your SMEs/engineers need to be able to make changes to the content, then you need to be using some sort of source control or move to a docs-as-code structure with another toolchain.

O
Orly5E82Author
Inspiring
September 13, 2022

HI Jeff, 

I didn't get any responses so far, except for yours. 

I was under the impression that I could import FM into RH. Once having stabalized this, I thought that making changes in RH would be reflected in the FM files, if the said FM files are linked. However, now I realize, this will not help with the HTML aspect, i.e. each SME/engineer would need either RH as well. 

Thanks for responding 🙂 Have a great day!

Orly

Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 13, 2022

Nope, the FM to RH pathways are always a one-way street. Importing is a one-off thing; linking means that changes in the FM source content are reflected in the RH project that it's linked to - never goes the other way (RH to FM).

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