RE: RoboHelp for FrameMaker

[Brian Jennings <BrianJennings -at- cougarmtn -dot- com>]

Short answer. Yes.

RH 4 FM is capable of manipulating FM files in many ways. This is largely
based on Paragraph styles. For example, you could have RH 4 FM automatically
create a new .htm help topic for every Heading 1 in your FM document. In my
case I'm basically taking the book I have in Frame and using the entire book
as the source for the .chm. I then have it break a few of the headings into
individual topics in the help file. If I don't want parts of the original FM
text to appear in the .chm I can use conditional text or tell RH 4 FM to
ignore entire FM source files or even tell it not to output some paragraph
styles. I also con basicalyl define exactly how I want it to name the .html
topics in the .chm. They can be based on the Heading (Welcome to this Guide
would become the .html topic "Welcome to this Guide.html").

let me know if you need more clarification. If you like FM and need to
output the same content to print, pdf, and/or online .chm or webhelp I would
highly recommend looking at RH 4 FM.

Brian

-----Original Message-----
From: mlist -at- ca -dot- rainbow -dot- com [mailto:mlist -at- ca -dot- rainbow -dot- com] 
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2004 9:08 AM
To: BrianJennings -at- cougarmtn -dot- com; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Subject: RE: RoboHelp for FrameMaker




Brian Jennings [mailto:BrianJennings -at- cougarmtn -dot- com] 
raved about RoboHelp for FrameMaker: 


> Basically the product does almost everything we need it to do to 
> effectively turn our FM source files into online .chm files. The only 
> thing it doesn't do is support merging of help files and as a 
> result I am 
> still using RH for the purpose of merging .chm's I create 
> with RH 4 FM. 
I've got RH X4.1 (the one that's associated with Word, I guess). 
Prior to getting it, last October, I worked almost exclusively 
with FrameMaker for five years of PDF/Print documents. 
Then the new owners of our company said: We use RH X4.1 -- you 
use it, too. And I did. 
So, I'm wondering.  
To use RH4FM, do you need to break all your FM documents into 
separate little one-and-two-pagers (equivalent to reasonable- 
length Help topics)?? Or does RH4FM have ways to let you 
extract Help topics from 20-page FM chapters? 
This is purely theoretical wondering for me, as I doubt I'll 
be trying to suck my 500 pages of RH WebHelp topics back 
into FrameMaker any time soon... 
/kevin