Topics Removed from RoboHelp TOC After Update

[prairiewriter]

We are preparing our documentation for release and I have just encountered an issue, which might delay the release of our product. When I update the FrameMaker files, the majority (95%) of my topics were removed from the TOC. I must now recreate the TOC and manually update all of my links.

This is a critical issue. Has anyone encountered this? If so, what was your solution?

Thanks!

[Guest]

Hi Prairiewriter, may I ask how you built your TOC initially in RoboHelp? In other words, did you build it automatically using the TOC in FrameMaker, or did you first link the FrameMaker files and then manually created the TOC in RoboHelp? 

As a best practice, it's better to use the FrameMaker TOC in RoboHelp, this way whenever you update your FrameMaker book, the TOC in RoboHelp will be automatically updated and thus you won't have to manually re-create it.

In case you are not familiar with this process, I quickly recorded an uploaded a Captivate how-to for you here: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/frametocinrh8/

Please try this and keep me posted and thanks for using our Adobe Tech Comm Suite.

Sincerely,

RJ Jacquez

Adobe TCS2 Evangelist

on Twitter @rjacquez

[prairiewriter]

RJ:

Thank you for the quick response – again! I built the TOC manually because the auto-generated TOC looked terrible and required a great deal of manual cleaning. For example, when the TOC was auto-generated, many of the topic names were replaced with the cross reference ID number. In addition, the auto-generated TOC was not organized correctly. Our existing FrameMaker document template is excellent for printed documentation, but it doesn’t translate well to an online Help format.

I have not had difficulty with the manually created TOC until recently. When the topic content changed in the FrameMaker file, the topics updated correctly in RoboHelp. I did notice that when a topic title was changed that the topic was removed from the RoboHelp TOC. Recently, one of our team added a new chapter to every FrameMaker file. I think this might be the reason why all of the topics were removed and I received error messages.

I think it is a severe limitation that you cannot create a manual TOC and have it function correctly. I understand and (grudgingly) accept that one or two topics might be removed if I make a significant change. However, I find it unacceptable that the entire TOC is wiped clean when a new chapter is added to the parent FrameMaker file.

Thank you again for your assistance.

[prairiewriter]

RJ:

One final thought. You might want to consider updating the tutorial for creating tables of contents. The linked Captivate video demonstrates the creation of a TOC perfectly. However, in the example, topics are imported with the numbering from the original FrameMaker document. Online help is not linear and topic numbering is not helpful. In the example you provided, a user might want to customize their style sheet to remove the numbering, or manually remove the numbering in the TOC.

If a user modifies topics in the TOC in this manner, are the topics removed on the next update?