Single Sourcing Query: Field Help in FrameMaker and Robohelp

[Virginia -dot- Agnew -at- sage -dot- com]

Hello!

I have read a lot here during the past year regarding single-sourcing,
context-sensitive field help, FrameMaker, and Robohelp, so here's a question
about all these things.

For my company's move to single-sourcery, we purchased FrameMaker 8.0 and
decided to use it with our current Robohelp x5 software. (We purchased FM
prior to the release of the Tech Comm Suite --unfortuante timing.)

FM has been great with conditional tags for our Print manual and our Online
help, but we would like to use a third conditional tag for field level help.
Importing the FM source doc into Robohelp with the Online tags works fine,
but importing with the Field tag has some side effects --one of which is the
current thorn in our side.

In the FM source doc, modeled most closely on the existing Print manual, all
our fields are listed in tables --a table for each dialog box. This works
nicely in print guides as well as for online task topics. Since the field
name and field definition as listed in the table are the same as the topic
we would use for F1 (or context-sensitive) field help, we wanted to tag the
content in these tables and import them into Robohelp when creating field
help topics. We don't want to maintain a separate doc for field help since
that would defeat the main advantage and definition of single-sourcery.

While we are able to import each row in the field as a topic (setting new
topics to begin with the style of the field name used in the table),
Robohelp still reads the table or table-cell formatting from which the text
is coming, and places the text in a textbox in the topic.  Is there a way to
import our tables so that we get each row of the table to be a separate
topic _without_ Robohelp placing the topic text in a textbox?

Thanks! 

Virginia

Virginia Agnew
Technical Writer
Sage Software
www.sage.com <www.sage.com> 


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