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

Howard, I've just been going through the same exercise as you - except that
I have 62 documents to convert from Word regularly. 
RoboHelp gave me realIy nicely formatted HTML but not much else.
 
Since then, I've been experimenting with MadCap's Flare and found it much
more rewarding - once you get used to the terminology, of course. It's much,
much quicker to get the results I want without lots of manual manipulation.
 
Best regards...

-----Original Message-----
From: Howard.Silcock@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:Howard.Silcock@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, 29 February 2008 1:52 PM
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: 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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