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popup window and Printed Documentation

Participant ,
Oct 08, 2015 Oct 08, 2015

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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

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LEGEND ,
Oct 09, 2015 Oct 09, 2015

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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?

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Participant ,
Oct 09, 2015 Oct 09, 2015

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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

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LEGEND ,
Oct 09, 2015 Oct 09, 2015

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LOL, just an observation here, but since the advent of working hyperlinks in Word documents with RoboHelp, it totally baffles me as to why this is such an important feature for folks. The very existence of RoboHelp is to create something for folks to use so they don't have to resort to using Microsoft Word to view output.

Cheers... Rick

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Participant ,
Oct 09, 2015 Oct 09, 2015

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Hi, Rick.

Our reviewers like to review content in Microsoft Word so that they can make their changes in Word.

In addition, if we decide to single-source the RoboHelp content as PDF documents in the future, we’ll want all the hyperlinks to be active.

Carol

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LEGEND ,
Oct 09, 2015 Oct 09, 2015

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Hmmm, reviewing makes a bit of sense. I could see that because most folks have Word installed. Assuming that the popup link would work (albeit pointing to a different page somewhere) how does the reviewer know it would be a popup as opposed to a basic link?

Personally, I'm more fond (fonder?) of the PDF review process.

PDF does make sense if you are delivering perhaps a few pages. But it would seem to suffer the same issues I see with Word. What I mean by that is it would baffle me why someone might use RoboHelp as a means of only ever creating PDF output.

Anyhoo, thanks for sharing your insights!

Rick

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Participant ,
Oct 09, 2015 Oct 09, 2015

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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

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LEGEND ,
Oct 09, 2015 Oct 09, 2015

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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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Participant ,
Oct 09, 2015 Oct 09, 2015

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Thanks, Rick. This looks like something we’ll want to investigate.

Carol

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Community Expert ,
Oct 09, 2015 Oct 09, 2015

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What sort of popup are you creating?

Links to other topics can be set to be popups and that is what the other threads are referring to. Popup links to other topics do work in the same way as other links in Rh2015. It is something I had been campaigning for since way back and it has been fixed. I just tested that.

If you are talking about text box popups, they will not work as that is not something understood by Word.


See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

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Participant ,
Oct 09, 2015 Oct 09, 2015

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Hi, Peter.

We’re planning to use auto-sizing popups in various places in the Help.

I, too, verified that it does work in RH 2015, provided that the target topic is in the SSL and, in our case , provided that we don’t use the Word document generated for the entire Help project (it ‘completes’ with errors, one of which appears to be the activation of the popup links). (I’ve got a call with Adobe this afternoon to try once again to figure out why Printed Doc doesn’t work for the entire Help project.)

We’re not using text box popups.

Thanks!

Carol

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Community Expert ,
Oct 12, 2015 Oct 12, 2015

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I'm confused. You started the thread by saying popups didn't link but now say they do other than in a document that is broken anyway.

Hopefully Adobe have helped with the broken document but if not start a fresh thread on that with some information about the number of topics and number of images.


See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

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Participant ,
Oct 12, 2015 Oct 12, 2015

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Sorry for the confusion, Peter. I posted about the popup problems before discovering that the popups worked in a Word document that generates without errors.

I’m still working with Adobe on the Printed Documentation issue, and will start a new thread only if I cannot resolve the issue with Adobe TCS Support.

Thanks.

Carol

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Participant ,
Oct 16, 2015 Oct 16, 2015

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I am very interested in this topic because I am having to change my RH file to not have popups. Very annoying. We generate a PDF file from RH to go onto the documentation server. Please post as soon as you hear back from Adobe.

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Participant ,
Oct 16, 2015 Oct 16, 2015

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Using RoboHelp 2015.

As Peter G. noted, text box popups will not appear in the Printed Documentation. Word does not recognize them.

Popup hyperlinks and auto-sizing popup links do appear in successfully generated Printed Documentation as active links.

The problem I've been trying to resolve is very specific to one particular project, a project in which Printed Documentation used to work when I included all topics in the layout. It now fails with an internal error, with the result that the TOC is not generated and some hyperlinks don't work. I'm still working with Adobe Support to try to figure out what is wrong with this project, which is not an extraordinarily large project. (I can generate Printed Documentation successfully from the same project when I select a few books to include in the SSL rather than all topics.

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New Here ,
Jan 07, 2016 Jan 07, 2016

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TXT....apparently you are successfully creating PDF from RH2015...can you tell me how to do that?  It does not work for me at all....yet it did in a prior version of RH...7 or 8 I believe....and I can't find anything that walks you through this process....

Any help is appreciated....

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Participant ,
Jan 07, 2016 Jan 07, 2016

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I use RoboHelp's "Create PDF for Review" to create PDFs with a few topics. I right-click the topic in the Project Manager and then select the Create PDF for Review option. There are then various options (based on Project Manager, base on TOC, etc.

I still can't generate PrintedDoc (PDF or Word) for my entire project. When I have time, I plan to contact Adobe yet again (this problem has been going on for nearly two years).

Carol

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Participant ,
Mar 23, 2016 Mar 23, 2016

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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.

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Participant ,
Mar 23, 2016 Mar 23, 2016

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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

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Community Expert ,
Mar 23, 2016 Mar 23, 2016

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Let me know direct if Adobe cannot resolve the issue.


See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

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

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Participant ,
Mar 24, 2016 Mar 24, 2016

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LATEST

Thanks, Peter. I will keep you posted. I've uploaded the project to an Adobe TCS FTP site.

We verified two things in yesterday's meeting with Adobe TCS:

  • Internal failure of Printed Documentation (.dotx) generated from the project that we open from Source Control, when we attempt to generate the entire project. Able to generate Printed Documentatin to .dotx for some random small subsets of the project. The .dotx seems to have all the topics, but fails to generate the Table of Contents.
  • Unable to create or import skins when in a project opened from Source Control (Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010). No problems creating and importing skins in a local project.

The support person thinks it's a communication problem between TFS and RoboHelp. He's setting up a similar environment to test our project over there.

Carol

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