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Apologies for the long message, but this requires some background.
A while back I put together an HTML page that serves as a "library" of
standard project management templates. The library is organized by
project phase, and the section on each phase includes a table with a row
for each template, including (among other things) a description and a
link to the template itself.
To make the page shorter and easier to scan, each description is in the
form of a DHTML drop-down. The reader sees only the name of the item,
but can click the name to display the description.
I used RoboHelp to create this file because I'm more familiar with it
than FrontPage. What I didn't know at the time was that since this
library page would be posted on SharePoint, it would've been better to
create it in FrontPage to start with. (SharePoint uses FrontPage as its
HTML editor - it may be possible to change this, but it's not an option
for me.) Moving to FrontPage would also make it easier for others to
edit the file, since I'm the only one with RoboHelp.
There are three issues re: editing the file in FrontPage:
1. In FrontPage's Normal view, the drop-down content (which,
as RH users may know, is stored separately at the beginning
of the file) appears superimposed on the page text. This
makes it impossible to edit the first 25% or so of the file.
2. Although I kind of understand how RH's drop-downs work, it
seems inefficient to learn to code new ones myself. (It's
also not a great option for my coworkers, who are less
familiar with HTML.)
3. The only option I could find in FrontPage for creating
something similar was "collapsible outlines", which require
the use of HTML lists (<ul>/<ol>). I was able to make this
work, but only with a lot of manual paragraph formatting.
Although I can tag something as a list AND apply a style,
applying the style doesn't seem to remove the indents/
bullets/numbers (which I don't want).
So, finally, here are my questions:
Have any of you found a reasonably straightforward way to create
something resembling RH's DHTML drop-downs in FrontPage (without bullets
or numbers, and without superimposed text in Normal view)?
I'm probably dreaming here, but if you answered "yes" to the above, do
you know of any way to convert the RH code to something FrontPage likes
better rather than recreating the whole thing?
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