Hyperlinks in Framemaker Extend to Entire

Report · Sep 20, 2011

TCS 2

RH 8.0.2.208

FM 9.0p255

On importing a document with hypertext markers from FrameMaker to Robohelp, the hypertext extends to the entire sentence/paragraph.

Example: "Source: Facebook Glossary" is the phrase with the hyperlink. On import into Robohelp, the entire definition of the term becomes a hyerlink as well. The closing </a> tag is at the end of the paragraph.

Is there a workaround for this, or am I simply missing something?

Thanks in advance,

Nima

Report · Dec 01, 2011

You are probably not missing anything. To my recollection this was the case with RH 7 and FM 8 as well. IOW, we still have the same issue with RH 8 and FM 9. If you think about it this behavior is kind of expected as there is no end marker set in FM when adding the marker. IOW, there is probably no way RH can understand where the termination tag should be (i.e. </a>).

The ideal solution would be for FM to set a begin and end marker (e.g. ... for more information, see the <a href>product user guide</a> for ...). This way I could select a portion of the text and add my link. Deleting either of the makers will of course mean that the link is deleted as you would have to remove the other marker as well in order to avoid unterminated links. IOW, it would be ideal if you could move the markers around without resorting to cut and paste.

A less ideal solution would of course be for RH to just wrap the link around the word where FM has its marker. The latter means that you will get less usable links (ref example above).

IOW, I would love to see a solution for this as we are stuck with manual fixes ...

Report · Sep 04, 2013

Oh dear - I think I have encountered pretty much the same bug, I'm using TCS4 (FM11 + RH10).

I have something like this in Frame:

A sentence with a link at the end www.mylink.com

As per the usual method in Frame, I apply a character style to www.mylink.com, add a Marker of type Hypertext, and set the marker text to "message URL http://www.mylink.com"

But if I import to Robohelp and generate a .CHM file, this comes out as "A sentence with a link at the end" being the link!! and www.mylink.com not being! Gah! (i.e. it applies the link to the whole paragraph, *up to* the marker point!)

Is this really the way TCS behaves? I'm trying to single-source in FM, as the FM source will be translated to at least half a dozen languages. It will be a big overhead to manually repair the broken links in Robohelp for each translated source

Report · Sep 04, 2013

What happens if you place the marker at the end of the mylink.com address and ensure that the marker is within the character tag applied to the link?

Report · Sep 05, 2013

Ah, Arnis you are a genius That worked! Thanks.

I found I had to first type an extra space character after the link (and marker), apply the character style to the space (and which point, the "Upside-down T" marker symbol changed colour to reflect it was tagged with the character style... I could then delete the trailing space and the marker stayed tagged....

I don't need to bother with this amount of cajoling to get hyperlinks to work in when generating PDFs from the same Frame source: having the marker at the start of the link text works fine.