RoboHelp options within FrameMaker

If you are creating a new document within FrameMaker that you want to published from RoboHelp, you can avoid the traditional ways of having to define custom markers for pagination and topic naming. You can add Page Break markers to denote the topics that should be converted as separate Help topics, and define their topic names.

You can add the context-sensitive Help map IDs that you received from your product development team to paragraphs within FrameMaker content. For best results, ensure that you are applying the map IDs to heading styles that you identified for pagination.

1. Click on the paragraph text that you want to insert the index marker.

2. Select Adobe RoboHelp > Apply Index Marker.

3. Enter the index entry and click OK.

You can create dynamic HTML effects such as drop-down text and expanding text in your FrameMaker documents if you want to have the published online Help formats to have these options.

Use the drop-down text effect to provide alternative task options and basic conceptual topics, summarize the questions on an FAQ, and shorten nested procedures. Text that you mark as drop-down body is displayed in your PDF output. But the text appears online only when the user clicks the drop-down text caption on the Help page.

Similarly, you can use expanding text DHTML effect to display expanded definitions, key terms, or links to overview topics embedded in a paragraph. Expanding text requires an expanding text caption that contains the link and expanding text body that is displayed when a user clicks the expanding text link. Expanding text body is not displayed in PDF. It appears only in the Help page when a user clicks the text that contains the expanding text link.

These DHTML effects require two components: a caption and body. You apply the drop-down text effects to paragraphs and the expanding text effect to characters. When the drop-down text effect is created, two paragraph formats, DropDownCaption and DropDownBody, are added to the FrameMaker document. When the expanding text effect is created, two character formats—ExpandingTextCaption and ExpandingTextBody—are added. These formats are imported to the RoboHelp project when you import the FrameMaker documents. The effects are visible in the created HTML topics.

If the HTML topic generated contains only the captions without the accompanying body formats, links are generated and visible in the HTML topic. If the HTML topic generated contains a text body without the corresponding captions, no links are generated. In addition, if a paragraph to which the drop-down text body format is applied is also specified for conversion to an autonumbered list, the list conversion is ignored.