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Subject:Map files in RoboHELP projects From:Hope Cascio <hope -dot- d -dot- cascio -at- US -dot- ARTHURANDERSEN -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 25 Mar 1998 08:09:32 -0500
In our department there are several writers who are each responsible for
perhaps 60 Help files, all of which constitute the entire Help system for
the software we develop. Now that things are a bit quieter, we've had a
chance to talk and realized that we're each handling the map files slightly
differently, and that there might also be better ways to handle them that
none of us are implementing.
TO AUTO-GENERATE OR NOT TO AUTO-GENERATE, THAT IS THE QUESTION
Currently, we're using RoboHELP 4.0, but will be moving to RoboHELP 5.0
sometime this summer, around the same time we would be able to make any
changes to the map files. Of the writers in the department, one uses the
Standard Help (.HH) Files, Smart Removal, and Automatic Map File generation
features of RoboHELP. Those using the .HM extension (a workaround we
inherited from RH 2.6... talk about legacies!) generate a map file with
the .HH extension, then change the extension name to .HM. After that, they
don't use any of the automatic features and add all strings manually. Do
you have any recommendations regarding a move to the .HH files from the .HM
files?
AN ID STRING BY ANY OTHER NAME
We also discovered that the Microsoft Help Workshop Compiler generates an
error message if there's a topic in one of the .RTF files with an IDH_
string that does not appear in the map file. Do you have any comments or
suggestions regarding the implementation of the IDH prefix in ID strings?
If you don't think this is of general interest, please respond to me off
list. I will share anything posted to the list or to me personally with my
group. If anyone's interested in the results, I'll keep them all and when
we've reached a decision here, I'll let the list know what we decided and
what input we got from the list. Also, please pardon the cross-post, but
we thought it was at least as much a techwr-l issue as it is a winhlp-l
issue.
Thanks in advance,
Hope Cascio
Knowledge Transfer Developer
