Run-in head - default punctuation in FM not carrying through to RH

Report · Sep 19, 2012

TC 4 (FM11, RH10).

Hi everyone

I'm an experienced FM user who's just got the job of bringing our 3000-page reference manual into RH to produce HTML. Never touched RH before in my life, and overall I'm very impressed so far at how well our FM source has imported.

But one of our FM styles uses the "Run-in head - default punctuation" setting, and the punctuation character isn't showing up in RH. Instead, I get a blank line following the paragraph.

For example, here's a robohelp HTML snippet:

<td style="border-bottom: solid 1px #00547f; vertical-align: top;

padding-left: 6.00pt; padding-top: 3.00pt; padding-right: 6.00pt;

padding-bottom: 3.00pt;" width="306">awplus(config)

vlan database</td>

<td style="border-bottom: solid 1px #00547f; vertical-align: top;

padding-left: 6.00pt; padding-top: 3.00pt; padding-right: 6.00pt;

padding-bottom: 3.00pt;" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" width="319"><p

class="FM_zcCmdInstruction">

Enter the VLAN Configuration mode.</td>

The first cell of this should have two lines of text, like this:

awplus(config)#

vlan database

Instead, it has 3 lines:

awplus(config)

vlan database

In Framemaker, the word "awplus" is an autonumber, the "(config)" is typed in, and varies, and the # is the punctuation character for the run-in head. In RH, there's an extra   line, which is a non-breaking space. Can anyone explain why RH has added that?

Does anyone know if there's a setting I can tweak to get RH to import the punctuation character properly? I guess I can use search and replace on them if I have to, but there're thousands!

Many thanks

Rebecca

Report · Sep 19, 2012

It's good to understand that the run in in FM is actually a formatting convention for 2 consecutive paras.

Yes, you can do this, but there are 2 parts.

First, map your para tags to actual css entries so that you remove the FM_ entries for <p class=FM_zcCmdSyntaxRA, etc.

Then, get wildly creative on your CSS to get the elements to align and punctuate properly.

I recommend hiring a flat-out CSS expert to get the alignment and punctuation done...I'm not one, but "I know a guy"

-Matt

@mattrsullivan

-Matt Sullivan
FrameMaker Course Creator, Author, Trainer, Consultant

Report · Sep 20, 2012

Hi Matt

Thanks very much for the answer. Botheration that it's not easy to sort in FM or RH - but not surprising. I don't have a CSS expert on hand but I do have a scripting expert or two. It looks like the strings are repetitive enough that we can use a script to change them in the HTML, so that's probably the way we'll go for now.

Cheers

Rebecca