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A
AIR-Chayah
Inspiring
October 8, 2015
Question

popup window and Printed Documentation

  • October 8, 2015
  • 2 replies
  • 1842 views

Good afternoon.

In January 2013 I found a problem, which appeared to be a known issue, that content in popup windows would not appear in Printed Documentation. As a result, I changed all popup windows to drop-down text.

We have been asked to consider using popup windows again and so I did a quick test in RoboHelp 2015. The problem still appears to exist. I added a popup window to some text, generated Printed Documentation, and found that the popup window has no hyperlink and, therefore, no associated content.

This is a problem for two reasons:

  • We often generate Printed Documentation of the Help for our reviewers (they prefer to review in Word).
  • We are considering moving to single-sourcing some day. But, if RoboHelp ignores the content in the popup windows when generating Printed Documentation, we would be single-sourcing incomplete content.

Do any of you have any experience with this problem? Is it possibly user error on my part?

Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

Carol

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

TXTechWriter
TXTechWriter
Inspiring
March 23, 2016

I know this has been a while but I have successfully generated PDF and Word documents from RH 2015. I just click the Printed Documentation or PDF Output on the Output tab. You can generate the entire document or whatever topics you need.

A
AIR-ChayahAuthor
Inspiring
March 23, 2016

Thanks.

We generate PDF and Word documents successfully for many years. We think the problem started when we started working out of Source Control. While we can't generate the entire Help project (which is not extraordinarily large) successfully, we can generate subsets of it successfully.

Even when the generation fails, it appears to generate everything except for the TOC.

At any rate, we have another Adobe TCS call today to try to resolve the problem.

Carol

Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
March 23, 2016

Let me know direct if Adobe cannot resolve the issue.

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

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Willam van Weelden
Willam van Weelden
Inspiring
October 9, 2015

What are you expecting? When you insert a popup, you add a link to another topic. You don't add anything to the topic itself. So if you create printed documentation, the content from a popup won't be added to the topic. Or am I not understanding the problem?

Have you tried adding the topic with the popup to the Printed Documentation output by selecting it in the SSL? Does that give you what you require?

A
AIR-ChayahAuthor
Inspiring
October 9, 2015

Thanks for the prompt reply, Willam.

I was expecting the popup link to be active so that the user of the Word document could Ctrl+Click to access the link. This works for the hyperlinks, but didn’t work for a test popup link. However, I was looking at a Printed Documentation document that I’d generated by trying to generate the entire Help project. This document had “completed with errors” and I thought that the lack of the generated TOC was the only error. In looking more closely, I see that the document is also missing images. Therefore, I think that the popup link failure in that document is related to the incomplete generation of the document. (I have been trying to resolve this issue with Adobe TCS Support for a long time.)

Based on your questions, I did another test of a much smaller segment of the project. No hyperlinks worked when the target of the hyperlink was not included in the SSL, but both types of hyperlinks worked when I explicitly included the target topics in the SSL (not necessarily in the Table of Contents).

Bottom line:

· We’d like RoboHelp to successfully generate the entire project with TOC, all content, all images, and all hyperlinks, and hope to resolve that eventually with TCS Support.

· Hyperlinks work as long as the target topic is in the SSL.

Thank you.

Carol

Captiv8r
Captiv8r
Legend
October 9, 2015

Rick,

The hyperlinks usually are underlined in Word. When the user hovers over the link, he/she sees that Ctrl+Click will take them to the target of the hyperlink (whether a popup or a regular hyperlink). From the reviewer’s perspective, it doesn’t matter whether the link is a popup or a regular link.

I’ve tried the PDF review process at other companies and found that it didn’t work as well as the Word review process. Of course in those days Reader was not very robust and most companies wouldn’t pay for everyone to have Acrobat. I’m not sure whether Reader these days supports reviewing.

In our case, we use RoboHelp to generate WebHelp and deploy it to a homegrown Web Server. However, our clients occasionally ask for PDFs of parts of the Help. We want to be able to create quality PDFs from parts of the Help.

Carol


Yep, the standard (and free) PDF viewer is now all that is needed. No need for full blown Acrobat.

And the really sweet part is that when users add comments and mark up, those flow back into RoboHelp for the author to see.

Cheers... Rick

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