How do I get change bars to appear in Robohelp output?

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
October 22, 2013
1 reply
1224 views

I am using Frame 11 and Robohelp 10. I have used change bars to mark source content that I have updated (in Frame). When I import and generate output using Robohelp, however, I don't see any indication that that change indicator is coming across anywhere. I need to be able to indicate content changes visually to my audience. Any ideas about how to do that without resorting to changing the content in Robohelp manually or using different para/char styles in Frame?

FrameMaker integration

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Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

Are looking for this to be visible in your “finished” help? I’d be very surprised if RH could show that in the output. It might be able to display it in the RH topics, but I suspect it would get all filtered out in the output. RH is very much a “end of the production line” tool in the TCS workflow.

V

VW670Author

Participating Frequently

Yes, I need something in finished help. I need to be able to provide a visual cue to the audience that specific text has changed in both the finished paper and the online outputs. I did this in the past by applying gray highlighting via character formatting in Framemaker. Unfortunately, removing character-level formatting peppered throughout a 600-page guide in Frame is tedious, to say the least. Therefore, I am looking for another solution. I was hoping that change bars would work. You can cause them to appear in the finished Frame output, and I figured that when imported into Robohelp there would be a marker or something in the HTML that I could work with. However, I don't see anything to that effect in the HTML in Robohelp. I am using the import feature. Maybe there is another way for me to bring over the content that will include that metadata? Or perhaps there is an entirely different approach I should be using to achieve my objective?

Arnis Gubins

Inspiring

@Arnis--While this is certainly a viable way to manage my situation, I suspect that the build-up of such tags over the years caused some issues for me. I started having weird problems when I tried to convert to Robohelp. I created a completely clean version of my book (i.e., got rid of all character-level formatting, comment markers, etc.) and that solved many of the problems. I don't know if all those years of layering character formatting caused my issues on their own, but my take-away from that experience is that I'm likely to save myself hours of headaches if I start with a "clean" version of my book at the top of each revision cycle.

Certainly having many overlapping tags could lead to potential problems when converting between different data models (i.e. FM to RH).

To strip out unwanted character tags, Steve Kubis' (Silicon Prairrie Software) Character Tools plug-in will allow you to do this at a reasonable cost ($10).

See: http://www.siliconprairiesoftware.com/Products.html

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