Re: Printed/online doc from FrameMaker - a little long

[Sharon Burton-Hardin <sharonburton -at- EMAIL -dot- MSN -dot- COM>]

I explored several secondary products to do this but the cost stopped me -
~$400 - or the tool doesn't work after Frame 5.1.
After having spent many hours trying to figure out the most effective way to
do this and several hours on the phone with BS, I have a solution that is
painful but better than any other I found.

First of all, going from Frame to HTML to RoboHTML was not a solution.
Regardless of what I did, the Frame generated HTML still had the paragraph
tags (wrong for HTML) associated with them when I brought it into RoboHTML.
Worse, I got a weird code at the beginning of each paragraph that was unique
for each paragraph. S/R wouldn't work and hand deleting and retagging the
paragraphs of 1000 files was not an option.

So here is what you do: strip out the graphics first. Ugly but there it is.
Save as RTF - if the graphics are in, it can take forever or worse, crash.
Import into RoboHELP and let it automatically create topics using the
headings. After you have all the topics in RoboHELP, S/R all useless
paragraph tags and replace them with the plain vanilla ready for HTML.

The next part is the most important. Compile as straight 3.0 help. This is
required or the next part won't work right. After you have built as a 3.0
help, import it into RoboHTML, using the embedded style option in the
wizard. After the import process is complete, the HTML topics will have the
correct paragraph tags associated with the text. If you build with 4.0
options, all the text is normal, with the correct formatting. But if you
need to modify all the heading 1's to a different color or font or
something, you are screwed. BS support thought this was OK but it was a show
stopper for me.

Don't try the single source to HTML help in RoboHELP. It crashes. You have
to do all the steps I describe here or this simply doesn't work right. And
who had the time to retag thousands of topics? Not me...

I spent several hours on the phone with BS and they said that there was no
way to decompile help and maintain the styles but doing it this way works.
It is just painful...

All written up in the latest RoboNEWS!

sharon

Sharon Burton-Hardin
President of the Inland Empire chapter of the STC
Anthrobytes Consulting
Home of RoboNEWS(tm), the unofficial RoboHELP newsletter
www.anthrobytes.com
Check out www.WinHelp.net!
See www.sharonburton.com!

-----Original Message-----
Then Gerry Bourguignon said:
>I need to investigate producing both printed documents and HTML Help from
>FrameMaker, and was wondering why you would use (and therefore have to
>purchase) WebWorks instead of using FrameMaker's Save As HTML facility. I
am
>currently using RoboHELP HTML Edition 7 to document a suite of web-based
>products, and use FrameMaker+SGML 5.5 primarily to maintain printed
>documentation (and generate PDF) for legacy products.
>
>Any feedback would be appreciated. I apologize if this topic has been
>discussed at length in the past.  I was unable to search the TECHWR-L
>archives when I tried this morning.
>
>Regards,
>Gerry Bourguignon
>LAVA Systems Inc.
>Toronto, ON, Canada.

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