Category: Help Authoring

RoboHelp allows you to integrate content created by different authors in Microsoft Word and Adobe FrameMaker. You can create projects by linking or importing Word and FrameMaker documents and then publish in different formats, including printed documentation. You can also use Word and FrameMaker documents as source files in an existing RoboHelp project. 

This article is a quick summary of the import and linking process.

by Kevin Siegel  

If you want to ensure that the appearance of your topics is consistent project-wide, one of the first things you should think about doing is creating a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and then assigning the CSS to all the topics in your project.

To assign the CSS to a single topic, open the topic. On the Formatting toolbar, click the Assign Style Sheet or Create New command. Select an existing CSS from the drop-down menu (or create a new one on the fly) and you are done.

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by Kevin Siegel  

You can do a lot of fancy stuff in Word. In fact, if you're really comfortable using the program, you can create a book that looks every bit as good as those produced by desktop publishers using programs such as QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign or Adobe FrameMaker. (Okay, okay… I'm not going to venture any deeper into the muck… Word can create some pretty complex stuff, but it's not for me… I prefer to use FrameMaker.)

Many people who use RoboHelp also use Word as the main authoring tool for the content that will be imported into RoboHelp. Unfortunately, during the import process there's potential trouble around every corner. For instance, the more complex the Word layout, the higher the risk that something will go wrong when that layout is imported into RoboHelp.

Let's take Word's ability to wrap text around an item and the Shapes feature as examples. You can use the Shapes feature to quickly draw a line or a callout to a screen capture inserted into a Word document. The shapes may look just fine in Word. However, once imported into a RoboHelp project the resulting collection of screen capture, line and callout will rarely look very good. This is especially true if you use any of Word'sWrap Text features other than Inline with Text. (One would use Word's Wrap feature on an object to control exactly where that object appears in the Word layout.) For example, in the image below Word's Wrap Text was set to Tight. There's a callout to the right and a squiggly line. 

The image below shows the content after it has been imported into a new RoboHelp topic. Notice that the Shapes did make it into RoboHelp… but the integrity of the layout has been lost.

 

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Need to learn RoboHelp? We have a 2-day class starting soon.

An important vulnerability has been identified in RoboHelp and RoboHelp Server. A specially crafted URL could be used to create a cross-site scripting attack on RoboHelp installations. The solution is now available.

1. On the Single Source Layouts pod, show the Properties of the layout.
2. Click the Next button to move to the second screen.
3. From the Search Options area, deselect Show Context in Search Result.

   

4. Generate and view the layout; then use the Search feature.

   You'll notice that the topic is still found, but only the Topic Title appears.

   

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One of the three most common features of any help
system is the Table of Contents (the Index and Search features are the others).
However, even while most Help Authors take the time to create a detailed and
seemingly helpful TOC, most Help System customers will not look to the TOC first
when they are trying to get help. Instead, customers they will typically look to
Search the Help System or use the Index.

Need to learn Adobe RoboHelp
8… and fast? I'm teaching a live, online RoboHelp class at the end of this
week (April 29-30). Click here to sign up or learn
more.

Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/kevin_siegel.

1. Open any of your project topics.
2. Choose Tools > Spelling Options and select the AutoCorrect tab.
3. In the Replace field, type some text (such as the letters zzz).
4. In the With field, type the text you would like to appear should you type the letters in the Replace field (in the example below, I typed three sentences into the With field.

   

5. Click the Add button.
6. Click the OK button.
7. Open any topic, press your [spacebar] and then type the letters you typed into the Replace field (such as zzz).
8. Press [spacebar] one final time and BAM! The letters have been replaced by whatever you typed in the Replace field.

Need to learn Adobe RoboHelp 8? And fast? I'm teaching an online RoboHelp class at the end of this month (April 29-30). Click here to sign up or learn more.

Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/kevin_siegel.

Question of the Week:

I'm
linking MS Word documents into a
RoboHelp project. On a smaller RoboHelp project, I copied and pasted
the footers into the body of the text because the footers were not
showing up in RoboHelp. The project I
have in front of me has way too many footers and will be updated too
often to
do that, but I haven't figured out how to do it automatically. Do you
know how?

Answer:

Yes,
you can import the footers from Word. If the document is going to
update frequently, you should
be linking the Word document into RoboHelp instead of importing the
text. After importing the document, and prior to generating the
topics, choose File > Project Settings. Click the Edit button to edit the conversion settings
for Word documents. From the Other Settings category, you'll find an option to
Convert Footer (and the Headers too).