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

[VW670]

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?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

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.

[VW670]

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?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Hmm…Since I’ve never used Track Text Edits or Change Bars, I just consulted my copy of the FM bible (aka Matt Sullivan’s Unstructured FM 11) – it doesn’t say too much about Change Bars except that they can be attached to character tags. It did say that tracking is done with conditional text – maybe you could mess about with the attributes associated with the conditions to have that appear in your RH WebHelp.

The other way is to do what you’ve done before with visual cues in the character tags – removing them shouldn’t be that much of a hassle if you used a script to automate it. I’m assuming you only do this once at the beginning of a cycle of authoring in FM right? I also think that there are plug ins that can do character tag stripping – you may want to check that route out too.

[VW670]

I didn't realize there were plug-ins that could strip character tags. I'll have to look into that. The powers that be would prefer that I indicate the parts of paragraphs that change rather than just the paragraphs, so character formatting i

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Think this post got chopped – maybe you want to edit it?

[Arnis Gubins]

If your "changed" content is tagged with a character style and you need to "remove" the visual appearance, all you need to do is re-define the tag style to be "AsIs" for all attributes. Very simple and fast. In fact, you can track mulitple revisions this way and chose to display whichever revisions you want.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

@Arnis – so the workflow would be something like – bring up the doc, set the character tag to Asis, save the doc (now all the character specific formatting is gone back to normal); reopen the doc and redefine the character tag to be whatever shade again, make your edits and apply it? Wouldn’t all the old edited text still have the character tag attached? You’d need to create a new “edited” character tag each time to go forward – you couldn’t recycle your previous one?

[Arnis Gubins]

I was thinking of more for versioning use, i.e. what's different at release miletstones, not everyday development/maintenance edits.

With Track Text Edits, one can only specifiy the foreground colours to be different for insertion or deletion. It would be a nice feature if the user could specify both foreground and background colours (and turn-off the underlines/strike-throughs) for the tracking.

The track Text Edits feature is just (special hardwired) Conditional text, so it might be possible to pass these through and maniupulate via CSS to control the visual appearance coming out of RH. I've never really played with this.

[VW670]

@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.

[Arnis Gubins]

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