Participant

Question

Integration of FM 8 with Robohelp

Forum|Forum|17 years ago
September 16, 2008
7 replies
3553 views

Hi
We are one of those companies, who are struggling to integrate FM 8 with Robohelp.

Has anyone in the forum successfully integrated these and have an Online Help system up and running.

Please do reply to forum. It would help me and my team to move forward.

Thanks

FrameMaker integration

This topic has been closed for replies.

N

Newsgroup_User

Inspiring

Unfortunately, no. That's kind of like asking the butcher to put the
steer back together so that you can walk it home. The TCS workflow was
designed so that the content is authored in FM and published through
RoboHelp.

S

StillTim

Participant

Help is actually our primary product. We sell (customized) printed manuals to our customers at an additional fee. So, we really want to go help to frame, not vice versa. Creating a Frame document is just a waste of our time if the customer hasn't purchased that option. It would be really helpful if the "Printed Documentation" export in Robohelp included Frame as an option. But, in our version it doesn't (we're actually using the latest versions, but we acquired them slightly before the tech communications suite was released).

Does anyone who has the suite know if this is an option?

BTW - if it's not, PLEASE Adobe add it for the next version of the suite.

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Tim.

To ask Adobe for this you need to go to http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform as they do not monitor the forums.

Its an additional step but I'm told FM imports Word documents OK.

Help others by clicking Correct Answer if the question is answered. Found the answer elsewhere? Share it here. "Upvote" is for useful posts.

K

kantimann

Participant

Hello all:
I was at the DocTrain East conf last week and think I've finally discovered a few things (RJ: If you're reading this, plrease confirm/deny).

First, I created a single FM document: RHmaster.fm.

To that document, I instantiated every p-tag, c-tag, cross-reference style, and variable in our entire set of Book template files (Front/TOC,Chap,Index, and so on).

I created a RH project and imported RHmaster.fm and converted it.

I then created both an fmstyles.css with every p-tag and c-tag in RHmaster.fm (and x-refs, too), to be the way I wanted them (or tried, anyway).

Then, I mapped every p-tag and c-tag to the identically-named style in RH. This creates an xml mapping file.

I saved the custom .xml file, and the fmstyles.css files to a safe location.

When I created my next RH project, I imported my book by reference and converted it.

I then imported my xml mapping file, and in the project directory, overwrote both default.css and fmstyles.css files with my custom job. When I reconverted again, I think all was converted as I wanted it, and then that those settings "stuck" with additional conversions to HTML help or whatever the format.

I'd love to hear if anyone else has done anything similar. This was the tack I took when I first used WebWorks: create a dummy doc with every possible Frame style, and map it to whatever/however you want. Then, save it for a "real" frame project.

Comments???

M

Maryann8

Inspiring

That method works for me, too. And pulling up the mapping file makes it fast and easy to set up a new project.

Here's a tip for setting up you master fmstyles.css:
Using Dreamweaver, or even just a text editor, open one of you chapter .css files (pick the one that has most of your styles).

Copy and paste all the styles into your fmstyles.css.
Edit the fmstyles.css, removing repeat styles.
You can reorganize it too, into list sections, heading sections, span sections, etc.
Add comments.
Edit and tidy your styles.

Big hint: each of your styles needs to start with .p
If you want it to show up in for mapping in RoboHelp.
For instance:

p.anchorFig {
margin-top: 24pt;
margin-bottom: 10pt;
font-size: 10pt;
}

Once I paste the styles into fmstyles.css, I like to rename them slightly.
I change the FM_ to M_.
That way, when I check out my chapter.css, I can see which ones RH has added, and which are mine.

You'll notice that once you've successfully mapped all your FM styles to the styles in fmstyles.css,
and no longer have any [Source] left, the chapter css style sheets lose all their FM_styleNameWhatevers,
and only use your nicely edited styles.

I use Dreamweaver to do all my editing, and have never had a problem using it.

K

kantimann

Participant

Really good input MaryAnn. Thanks very much.

Unfortunately, after the last post I made, I did more experiments, only to "apparently" find that my global changes in fmstyles.css were NOT getting into the rest of the chapters: I changed all font from Times > Ariel, and the conversion STILL gives me Times. So, first question, what am I doing wrong? Thought I had this sorted out.

Second, I could not find a way to define a paragraph style such that I can adjust the padding, and add a NOTE or CAUTION word. Where do those "master" styles exist? I can edit my NOTE style so that I have a border around a note, but I don't know how to "globally" get the padding above/below into it. The Padding is not an accessible box on the dialog???? And, I think I could figure out how to put NOTE in every instantiation of a Note style, except I don't know where to store it>

Any help appreciated.

M

Maryann8

Inspiring

After many weeks of work, and much trial and error, my department was able to get "OK" help out of referenced FM files. Our FM files are non-structured, and use a complex matrix of conditional text and shared chapters.
To do this, we needed to:
- Design and apply a separate FM template for the RoboHelp files.
- Design styles in the Robohelp default style sheet, and link to them.
- NOT use Convert AutoNumber to HTML list.
- Re-work all our jpg illustrations (reduce them from 300 ppi to 221 ppi).
- Change all our graphic frames to left-justified.
- Link by hand all our warning icons that formally appeared by using the Advanced setting in FM paragraph designer.
- Use boolean conditional text and set it before importing into RoboHelp.

What has turned out to be the biggest time sink, is that we had to move shared files down from our network on to local user's desktops, then move them back up (since RoboHelp crashes if we try to reference FM files located on the network). This has been a nightmare, with many hours of work accidentally over written.
Since we have common chapters shared by several books.

But the bottom line is, I guess, it can be done.

A

Anonymous

I have have been successful with integrating FrameMaker 8 and RoboHelp. The only problem that I see is that my RoboHelp project crashes occasionally and I have to re-create it. Although this is frustrating and an inconvience, it has not stopped me from producing a final guide in FrameMaker or in RoboHelp.

The key to a successful integration (in my opinion) is the style mappings. When you first create your RoboHelp project, assign fmstyles.css to the default topic. Create all the same styles in fmstyles that you use in your FrameMaker project. When you import your FrameMaker document by reference, I do check Convert AutoNumber to HTML list and then edit the style mappings to match.

I took an online class offered by iconlogic and found it VERY helpful with getting started using the Technical Communication Suite- the class explained everything and was very informative.

Hope this helps,
Amanda

M

Maryann8

Inspiring

AmandaTSS quote: "I do check Convert AutoNumber to HTML list and then edit the style mappings to match."

The main reason that I don't use the Convert AutoNumber to HTML list is that I lose all the autonumber text in our documents.
And we use autonumber text a lot (Note, Important, Caution, Danger, If, Then, To).
We have thousands of pages, so that would be a lot of work to replace. And losing the autonumber text feature would cause extra work for our writers.

Also, I don't think that assigning fmstyles.css to the default topic does anything magic.
We use that page only for a splash screen with two lines (that is rarely seen), so I don't bother to attach a style sheet.

K

katie_barnes

Participating Frequently

Oh and as a reply to actually help you in your task, you should take the time to watch Part 3 of the Adobe Technical Communication Suite: Getting Started series. It will tell you two KEY pieces of information. Namely: (1) you need to import the book by reference from within a project, and (2) you need to link a dummy topic to the fmstyles.css to globally make style changes to all your para styles. Check out the online training video. It's a bit tedious and slow, but will definitely be worth your while in the long run.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/robohelp/

O

octechwriter

Known Participant

I don't think you need to use "dummy topics" to make a global change to your CSS styles. If you link the fmstyles in the root folder to your template and reapply the template (which you have to do when you update your project anyway) to your topics, that works just fine. Dummy topics are not needed.

It would be a heck of a lot less complicated if all the topics in the project used one CSS file in the first place.

K

katie_barnes

Participating Frequently

Templates? I'm not sure what you mean. I imported my book by reference and didn't have to apply any templates to the project. The training video had me make a dummy topic on the top level of the project. Updates to the book cause any template changes to be overridden in my experience. (I tried to use a template to update my headers with an additional meta tag to no effect but I haven't given up completely yet.)

In any case, the training video part 3 was useful to me so I thought I'd recommend it for getting started.

K

katie_barnes

Participating Frequently

I am pretty close to finishing my first integrated project with this tool, but I have found it to be very limited when compared to WebWorks offering. I am seriously considering giving it the boot and going back to WebWorks, but I don't have time right now.

I have been especially unhappy with the level of documentation (from Adobe) on the integration btw these two products. I am unhappy with my ability to map to an alternate table style (to go with the help color scheme). And I can't seem to add my own meta tags into the headers at all despite trying to apply a template before the final compile (no changes to the FM source). It's very frustrating b/c I'll have to do a global search and replace in the final files. With WebWorks I had no post processing tasks like this. Bummer!

S

Steve_Gaghan

Participating Frequently

Hi Another Robohelp User,

We have successfully integrated FM 8 with RoboHelp. It is not as seemless as we would like it to be, but we have been able to generate WebHelp for our clients.

Steven P. Gaghan

O

octechwriter

Known Participant

Hi folks,

I suppose my answer depends on your definition of success. We have been able to create a fully-functioning help system using FM8 and RH7, but as Steve points out, the integration is not exactly seamless. In fact, it's nowhere near seamless. I'm not sure who has been beta testing these products (if anyone), but the integration between the two could not have been put through very wide-ranging tests before it went to market. Either that, or Adobe failed to listen to their testers.

Cheers!

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