Adobe 65030089 User Guide - Page 72

USING ROBOHELP HTML 9 66 Projects Page layout settings Often FrameMaker chapter templates specify an even number of pages so that new chapters begin on a recto (right) page. For online Help, ignore these pagination considerations. Headers and footers RoboHelp ignores headers and footers during conversion, including legal text such as "Confidential" and copyright lines. Include such text in the headers and footers in a separate step, after conversion. Similarly, in RoboHelp, re-create watermark text or images that you used in the printed documentation. Use the master page feature in RoboHelp to make these changes. Navigation In print, cross-references specify page numbers which are irrelevant in Help. You can map cross-reference formats in FrameMaker to a format without the chapter and page number. Converting to online Help removes chapter and section titles in headers and footers. You can enhance navigability by using breadcrumbs, back and next buttons, and a defined browse sequence instead. Redundant content To provide context in different sections of a printed document, writers generally add redundant information such as brief summaries of concepts covered previously. Because online Help is a random-access, nonlinear medium, it requires less redundant content. Use cross-references and conditional text options to minimize redundant content in your outputs. Chapter versus topic Printed documentation requires you to segregate content into self-contained chapters, which allow readers to logically and physically separate content. Online Help segregates content at topic level, accessed one topic at a time. Although you can group the content within chapters into folders that expand when a user navigates the table of contents, only one topic appears at a time. In this case, try to provide comprehensive information without adding redundancy by chunking related topics together. Context sensitivity Online Help formats allow you to link specific topics to related content within the application workflow. Although you can assign map IDs to topics in RoboHelp, you can also assign context-sensitive Help markers in FrameMaker documents. RoboHelp reads these markers and assigns the map IDs to the generated topics. Ensure that sufficient information is contained in the topics that are created from FrameMaker. For example, a short procedure as a stand-alone topic does not provide the conceptual information for the reader. To avoid creating topics with incomplete information, assign context-sensitive Help markers to topics at a higher level, so that the generated Help topic contains the concept, procedure, and any relevant graphics. Preparing FrameMaker documents for conversion to Help If the FrameMaker document that you are importing is an unstructured FrameMaker book, you can define a single FrameMaker template for the conversion. You can then specify this template as the project template that overrides the formats of individual documents at the RoboHelp project level. You can also reuse the conversion settings across other projects by exporting the conversion settings. Carefully examine the FrameMaker templates before importing the documents into RoboHelp, such as when you use a general-purpose FrameMaker template. If this template contains formats that aren't used in the book, omit those formats in the template you use for the conversion. 1 Create a FrameMaker template that contains the formats you need in Help. Alternatively, customize the FrameMaker template. You don't have to apply the template manually. You can set RoboHelp to apply a selected template to FrameMaker files before they are linked or imported to RoboHelp. In Structured FrameMaker, the element definition document (EDD) or the DTD used in the structured FrameMaker template automatically controls formatting. Because structured FrameMaker enforces a valid structure and format, structured documents do not contain format overrides. 2 Apply context-sensitive Help markers to the required topics. See "Convert context-sensitive Help markers from FrameMaker documents" on page 76. Last updated 12/14/2011