atw: Re: RoboHelp conditional builds [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

Hi, Margaret and others

No, it wasn't at the start or end, but I'm glad to have your warning about 
a potential bug there. 

I think I've now solved the problem I posted about.  I needed a better 
understanding of the relationships between books, pages and topics, which 
I eventually gained by reading extensively in RoboHelp's own online help. 
Isn't it strange when a company produces a product designed for on-line 
help and offers so much advice on how to create it, yet still produces its 
own on-line help that's so hard to use? Some key pieces of information I 
only found after reading so extensively through the topics that I was 
bound to see them eventually. Some topics were indexed, but only using 
terms (like 'hotspot' or 'dynamic HTML') that I never would have thought 
of looking under. 

I only had a fairly limited experience of RoboHelp before, and had to 
convert a manual that I'd written in Word into an HTML Help format. I 
decided to use RoboHelp's importing capabilities and see what it what do 
with the document. It did a reasonable job with the formatting, but I 
didn't like the way it broke it down into topics. The manual had lots of 
procedures and I thought each procedure should have its own topic, which 
wasn't how RoboHelp produced it. So I then did a lot of customisation, and 
the more I did the more ideas I got on how I could improve it. The problem 
was that I still wasn't really understanding what I was doing - and in 
particular I didn't fully get how the icons and text in the navigation 
pane (which RH had created for me) related to the topic files that get 
displayed in the right-hand pane. The books that RH had created in the 
conversion were all linked to topics that I eventually broke down into 
subtopics. I didn't understand that a book doesn't need to be linked to 
any topic. When some of those topics were then marked for exclusion in a 
conditional build, problems arose which I think were  caused by links with 
topics that weren't supposed to be there any more.

I feel I've led myself through a bit of a crash course while creating this 
manual! It's delayed the final production but I hope it will stand me in 
good stead for future projects. I wish someone could have given me a book 
(I mean a real book, one of those things made of paper - remember those?) 
about RoboHelp. For me that's better than clicking through all those 
links, and I prefer it even to a training course, though I know that 
on-line help is preferable sometimes - perhaps even for the project I'm 
working on.

Howard



"Margaret Hassall" <Margaret.Hassall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
Sent by: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
29/02/2008 12:16 PM
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Subject
atw: Re: RoboHelp conditional builds [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]






Is the book with the problem at either the start or end of  the TOC? I've 
moved on from RoboHelp a year or so now, but I always had a  Welcome topic 
at the start and a Copyright topic at the end that belonged in all 
possible outputs because there was a bug in RHx5 that caused the same 
problem as you describe when building to different outputs. I found the 
start/end topics to be the best work-around, but you can also re-arrange 
the  books in the TOC between builds if you don't want the extra  topics.
 
Margaret


From: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of  
Howard.Silcock@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, 28 February 2008 4:09  PM
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: atw: RoboHelp  conditional builds [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]


A question for people who have  experience using conditional builds with 
RoboHelp. 

I wanted to produce two CHM versions of an admin document  containing 
procedures, for two different audiences. One audience (staff at DFAT 
posts) has only limited access to the functionality, so their procedures 
form a  subset of the set of procedures for the other audience (our Voice 
Operations  Unit). I therefore created conditional build tags (POSTS and 
VOU)  to apply  to the topics and, as hoped, managed to produce two 
different CHM documents,  each displaying only the procedures for the 
relevant audience. 

The only snag is that in the table of  contents I grouped topics into 
books and I had hoped that, where a build  involved none of the topics in 
a book, that book would itself not appear in the  TOC. But that isn't so. 
The book did appear but it seems to have been converted  to a topic, and 
its contents are, most strangely, the text from a quite  different topic. 

Is there any way to  prevent a book from appearing in the TOC for a build 
when it consists of topics  excluded from that build? 

I should  explain that we're still using Version 5 here, in case that's 
relevant! 

Howard 


Howard Silcock
Technical Writer
Zare Pty Ltd
Ph  02  6261 2073 

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