Generating Context Sensitive Help in RoboHelp from FrameMaker Files

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When you import or add FrameMaker files (.book, .fm and .mif) in Adobe RoboHelp 7, you can also generate Context Sensitive Map IDs from FrameMaker source files. RoboHelp can convert custom markers defined in FrameMaker to map IDs and create bookmarks in HTML topics created during the import.

Authors can choose any custom marker and apply it at the beginning of the paragraphs in the source files. A unique ID should be specified as the marker text at the time of applying this marker. Since this marker text would be used as the marker ID, the marker text should contain only alphanumeric and ‘_’ (underscore) character as shown in the figure below. The custom marker applied is ‘ExpBank’ and the FrameMaker ID for this paragraph is specified as ‘Marker1_Authorised_Persons’.

At the time of importing/adding files in RoboHelp, you need to specify the customer marker type. By default, ‘Define Context Sensitive Help Marker’ text-field is populated with the entry ‘TopicAlias’ and should be overwritten with the appropriate marker name, in this case with ‘ExpBank’ (please see the figure below).

RoboHelp processes the FrameMaker markers with this Marker type. and corresponding RoboHelp numeric Id and associated bookmarks are created. These associations can be seen in the ‘Edit Map IDs’ Dialog (available under ‘Context-Sensitive Help’ in the ‘Project Set-up’ pod).

First Column ‘Map ID’ represents the same ID specified in FrameMaker as the marker text. Second column gives the numeric Map ID which is used in the output and the third column represents the target bookmark.

Update (posted on March 26, 2008 by Vivek Jain) – The behavior has changed after RoboHelp patch 7.0.1. RoboHelp does not generate the mapIDs automatically and enables you to load the developer provided mapping files. If you are generating mapping files for your developers, please generate it through RoboHelp and export it.

For importing the mapping file -> Go to Project Settings Pod, open Context Sensitive Help folder and right click on Map Files. You shall get Import Map File option in the context menu. In the import dialog box you will get option to import .hh, .hm and .h files. Please ensure that Locked option at the bottom is checked. RoboHelp will not touch your file if this option is on.

You can also see a report on the Map Ids (Tools->Reports) as shown in the screen-shot below.

The Map IDs can be tested through the ‘CSH Test’ tool. This tool (shown in the following figure) can be used for testing online/offline help.

In addition, RoboHelp provides several other features like changing the associations, importing and exporting map files etc.

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