Conversion of FM Cross-Refs to RH Hyperlinks (<a href="...">) - Maximum Lengths

Report · Jan 20, 2012

I'm running TCS 3.0 (FM 10.0.2.419 & RH 9.0.2.271) and observing a strange thing within the same RH topic when it comes to the conversion of FM cross-ref text into RH hyperlinks: some are working and others are not - within the same topic.

After much experimentation, it appears that there is a secret limit to the number of characters in the relative path reference that creates the RH hyperlink. I haven't worked out what the exact number is and wondered if anyone else had observed this. I didn't find any mention of any issues with this in the RH documentation, only the mention that your FM docs should be free of all unresolved cross-ref warnings (which mine are - the FM doc behaves quite well and you can happily jump around within it).

I stumbled upon this issue when I examined the generated WebHelp output and noticed that some of the links appeared and others didn't. After first checking the FM source doc and verifying that the cross-refs worked there, I then looked at the RH topic. The curious thing is that all appears to be well - in Design View, the links look like hyperlinks in appearance (nice blue text and underlining), and positioning the cursor on them shows "Hyperlink" in the Tag List, but if you switch to HTML View, the code shows an <a> coding instead of an <a href="../blah blah"> reference (which appears on the ones that work).

My path lengths can get overly long because I'm using the FM concept of "a book of books" - the one that I've been experimenting with reads like this when manually repaired:

<a href="../Club_Reporting_book/Club_Reporting_reference/Club_Management_Reports_Outstanding_Dues_Report.htm#XREF_GJK56_Outstanding_Dues">Club

Management > Reports > Outstanding Dues Report</a> which I think is 91 characters up to the .htm

I'm loathe to go and change the book names (and fix all the resulting busted cross-refs) because it creates a great ToC structure that comes over to RH fine, but if I have to, I will. I'd just like to know what limit there is that I need to get under to make this work. Anybody hazard a guess?

Report · Jan 24, 2012

Another odd thing - I can repair the "damaged" hyperlinks in the RH topics by selecting the text, right-clicking and removing the hyperlink (even though it's really not one at all), and then re-selecting the hyperlink icon and browsing to the same path and cross-ref marker as the link should have had when it came in from FM, and it works fine.

This is rather odd - one would have thought that if the path was too long for the href= tag to be created in the FM to RH import process, it would have failed when manually constructed too. Hmm...

Report · Jan 24, 2012

You're the FM <-> RH expert here... The only thing I can add is that the maximum length of an URL is limited by either the browser or the web server. But the maximum length is at least several thousand characters AFAIK before the first browser/server chokes. It seems like a FM/RH bug.

Doesn't RH convert FM docs to .mif before importing/linking? Might there be a limit in the .mif file? (Just guessing here, since I haven't got a clue to cause of the problem )

Greet,

Willam

Report · Jan 24, 2012

Phew, "expert", eh? I only wish! I've only been using this suite for a couple of years now ;>)

I think you might be on to something with the MIF connection - I remember seeing an "Importing MIF" dialog/warning screen when the FM books are sucked into RH on earlier versions of RH in TCS 2/2.5 - it doesn't seem to be present in TCS3 anymore. Maybe I'll try an experiment to see what the cross-refs look like in a MIF version of the FM file. I forget if RH can explicitly import a MIF doc - I'll have to check that out the next time I've got RH open.

Report · Jan 25, 2012

TCS 2.5; RH 8 and FM9 (all with the latest patches)

I am not sure this is related…came across a nightmarish bug in RH.

If there is more than one topic heading with the first two words identical,

then the x-refs in RH are all messed up. Example: “Using Basic Edit for

Campaigns” and “Using Basic Edit for Ads”

In Frame the x-refs are fine. In RH, even though each topic has a unique

ID, the assignments go haywire and you have to manually reassign them. It

took me some time before I realized what was happening and then hours to

correct them.

If FM to RH cannot retain even this fundamental level of integration, what

is the point of the TCS?

From: Jeff_Coatsworth

Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2012 5:28 PM

To: niregev

Subject: Conversion of FM Cross-Refs to RH

Hyperlinks (<a href="...">) - Maximum Lengths

Re: Conversion of FM Cross-Refs to RH Hyperlinks () - Maximum Lengths <...>

created by <...>Jeff_Coatsworth<http://forums.adobe.com/people/Jeff_Coatsworth>in

FrameMaker Integration - View the full

discussion<http://forums.adobe.com/message/4161501#4161501

Report · Jan 26, 2012

I'm not seeing that in my project & I've got a whole whack of topics that are virtually the same name - the identical ones (something like "About_this_Module") get numbers appended to the ends to make them unique and many others have names that start the same, but end differently, and they seem to work fine in RH.

Are you seeing the fake "hyperlink" markings in RH like I am? Can you post some code of one that's working & one that's not?

Report · Jan 29, 2012

I see that the x-ref numbers are unique and are always correct. For some

reason, even though the topic is in the same chapter, RH adds a hyperlink

to the wrong chapter and in some a link to a topic in a different chapter.

Example of two code snippets in the same topic.

- The hrefs are to different (and wrong) chapters (should be

Campaign Management) but the # x-ref is correct.

From: Jeff_Coatsworth

Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2012 5:42 PM

To: niregev

Subject: Conversion of FM Cross-Refs to RH

Hyperlinks (<a href="...">) - Maximum Lengths

Re: Conversion of FM Cross-Refs to RH Hyperlinks () - Maximum Lengths <...>

created by <...>Jeff_Coatsworth<http://forums.adobe.com/people/Jeff_Coatsworth>in

FrameMaker Integration - View the full

discussion<http://forums.adobe.com/message/4166597#4166597

Report · Jan 30, 2012

Did you see any effect (like @sschertz did) when you shortened the path name in FM (and fixed the broken xref links that result)?

Report · Jan 26, 2012

I am running into the same issue as Jeff -- some cross references do not convert and show up in the html with an <a> tag and no href component. It did not occur to me that this might be related to the length of the filenames and paths, as mine are not especially long. I've been fighting with this now for a few days and I've tried all sorts of things - even deleting x-ref markers in frame (breaking the xrefs) and the recreating the xrefs to generate new markers. No luck.

I did get a SLIGHT improvement when I renamed some of my Frame files from the book file and let frame correct the x-refs. This fixed SOME of the bad links, but then BROKE some others. So perhaps it is somehow related to filenames, but I can't figure out how exactly.

The bad links are (so far) only in a project that was originally created with a much earlier version of frame (7x), then converted to 9 last year, and then to 10 this year. A completely new project that was created in 9 and converted to 10 is (so far) working fine. So there may be some clues in that as well.

If anyone can find anything definite, I would love to hear about it. At the moment, I'm so frustrated and I'm wondering how on earth we're going to be able to use this tool to produce any real documentation for our customers. I certainly can't ship what I've produce so far with these broken links.