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

Thanks, Janet

This is a very useful comment, as we're still in a position here where we 
could choose to switch to Flare rather than upgrading to RoboHelp 7. I'm 
not sure what the others will think about it. 

I did try a demo version of Flare, but now I'd have a much better idea 
what to look for.  (However, the demo will have expired!)

Anyway it's good to get some input on this.

Howard



Janet Taylor <jtaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 
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29/02/2008 04:51 PM
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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> 
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29/02/2008 12:16 PM 
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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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