drop-down hotspot support

[Guest]

In WWP we were able to set up drop-down hotspots automatically based on FM paragraph tags. Can we do something like this in RoboHelp, or will we have to edit each topic to achieve this effect?

[JainVivek]

You can map FrameMaker styles to RoboHelp styles. In RoboHelp, you can make DHTML effects as part of RoboHelp styles. Edit the styles in fmstyles.css, map FrameMaker style to RoboHelp style and you will be able to have them appear automatically in RoboHelp. you must have RoboHelp patch 7.0.1 applied for this to work.

Drop Down and Expanding hotspots are implemented using javascripts in RoboHelp and are not handled through style definitions.

[Guest]

Thanks, I'll give it a try. the Tech Comm Suite demo installed RH 7.00.145 -- does this mean it's already patched?

[Peter Grainge]

No. Looking in RH you need to see 7.01.001

[Guest]

I'm patched, but having investigated the Styles controls (via the "Styles" button on the FrameMaker - RoboHelp Style Mappings dialog box) I think I may be barking up the wrong tree.

In the RH Style controls, there is no option to associate a style with a drop-down hotspot. In a way this is no surprise, because dropdown hotspots are not an effect you can associate with a single paragraph. You need to set up a <div> that defines a dropdown text area. In WWP, if an FM paragraph tag was marked for a dropdown, WWP created the <div> immediately following that paragraph, and ended the <div> according to certain rules.

Reading between the lines, I've come to the conclusion that setting up equivalent conversion behaviour in RH is not possible, and that if I want drop-down hotspots, I'll have to edit each HTML topic to add the javascript and define the <div> (probably using an "add drop-down hot spot" feature in the topic editor). Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[Peter Grainge]

I have no knowledge of FM but maybe this will help.

Is the issue your FM dropdowns are not appearing in RH in the way you want? In the RH project try Format | Styles | Other and defining what you want there.

[Guest]

As far as I know, FM does not offer any support for drop-down hot spots as part of its editing and page layout capabilities. With WWP, we were able to introduce them automatically in our CHMs.

For example, if we had an instruction in FM such as:

[step head] To edit the widget settings:
[step] Right click the widget.
[step] On the context menu, click Properties.

WWP would process [step head] to put a +/-- control next to it, and enclose the steps in a drop-down area. (We are using unstructured Frame; the tags in square brackets are just for clarification.)

It would be nice if RoboHelp could create drop-down hotspots automatically in the same way.

[JainVivek]

RoboHelp currently does not have an equivalent method for drop down and expanding hotspots. You can however create dynamic HTML effects like mouse over through style definitions.

[Guest]

I had a similar query to this one. Since we are single sourcing at my company, I was hoping that we could set up dropdowns on the FM side so that they would automatically work when imported to Robohelp. Since we are single-sourcing, I have been given the order to minimize the clean-up after import on the RH side.

Can any device be set up on the FM side that helps to shorten the length of a topic on the RH side, but includes options for help to display when needed --such as a dropdown or a mouseover or pop-up help?

Thanks!
Virginia

[Laverne_Henderson]

Hi All,

I may have a solution to the drop-down issue, but it's a little dirty. I tried coming at this from the source point of view like most people here and came up blank, so I asked a developer here to have a look. Long story short we are inserting code in the generated output. Our generated output is Webhelp so I'm not sure this solution will work for everyone. What the developer did was to insert a javascript file in the root directory of the generated output and then a few lines of code into the whtopic.js file:


/* Added for drop down text */
document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="dropdown_text.js"></script>');
document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="../dropdown_text.js"></script>');
document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="../../dropdown_text.js"></script>');


The most important part comes in the Frame source and the mapping to RH. You need to specify a unique style for all drop-down text. I left it mapped as "Source" from Frame to RH. In the code below you can see the style is "FMProcedure". The script includes everything under the "FMProcedure" style until it hits another "FMProcedure". The script is rough right now, Jeff just hammered something out so I could test it. But with a little javascript knowledge you could just specify another style in Frame so that the javascript file could insert a DIV tag. I know this only works for bodies of text an not in a paragraph, but I hope this helps.

Thanks

Laverne

[Karzons]

Very interesting writeup thank you.