Possible to specify a topic title?

Report · Mar 13, 2012

The RoboHelp topics that result from my linked FrameMaker files have the file names as their topic titles (the <title> tag). Since our file names are lowercase with underscores, users see things like "about_portfolio_optimization" when they do searches.

The following blog indicates that you can select the "Topic Name Marker" option on the Conversion settings dialog to specify the topic title (as well as the file name). I followed the instructions, but it didn't work. RoboHelp still based the <title> on the file name.

http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2009/06/robohelpframemaker_integration_some_tips.html

Has anyone else tried this, and did you get it to work?

Thanks,

Melanie

Report · Mar 20, 2012

Never tried it because I use paragraph level pagination. Sounds like you have to create a custom marker in FM and place it wherever you want to break up your text into RH topics. Then within the marker text, you type the file name you want created. Is this what you have done?

Report · Mar 20, 2012

It works, now that I've applied the latest RoboHelp updates.

It's not really what I was looking for. Our topics are all in separate files, so there's no need to manually break them. My problem is that 1) our file names are lowercase with no spaces and 2) the <title> is automatically generated based on the file name. So when users search, they'll get a list of titles like "about_initiatives" and "creating_a_new_initiative". At best, this looks strange. But it gets even worse when, for example, Product Management decides to rename the feature from "initiatives" to "scenarios" but we don't update the file names to avoid broken links. (We have merged help systems, so we're pretty cautious.)

So I was trying to request a feature that would allow me to specify a FrameMaker paragraph style to use as the <title>. Adobe support came back with this method of setting a variable as a substitute.

Good to know -- but it's certainly not what I was attempting to request. We have a very small doc team with some very large help systems to maintain, so I was hoping for something less manual in a future release.