FrameMaker and RoboHelp Style Mappings

FrameMaker,RoboHelp,Technical Communication,DITA,Suite,Help Authoring Tool,HAT

Perhaps the most important, and most powerful, feature of the FrameMaker import process is the style mappings. You can map FrameMaker paragraph and character styles to RoboHelp styles, which will automatically reformat your FrameMaker content for publication in RoboHelp. In addition, you can also specify:

• New definitions for FrameMaker cross-reference formats (e.g., to remove page numbers from cross-references in RoboHelp output)
• Style names that will trigger topic breaks in RoboHelp
• FrameMaker styles to ignore when the styles are imported into RoboHelp
• A default RoboHelp style to be applied to unmapped FrameMaker styles

Now, I’ll take you through some of these features in detail.

In the Style Conversion Settings section of the Settings dialog, there is an option to Convert AutoNumber to HTML list. This is generally preferred if the FrameMaker document does not include complex numbering (e.g., multilevel section numbering).

If you want to use a user defined HTML Tag for the paragraph styles, you can specify the tag e.g. ‘Pre’ tag. You can even choose the styles where this tag should be applied.

For applying properties, Click Select to open the FrameMaker Styles Conversion Properties dialog. Select the styles where these properties should be applied. Click OK to close the FrameMaker Styles Conversion Properties dialog and to return to the Style Settings dialog.

In the Style Mappings section of the Style Settings dialog, click Edit. The FrameMaker – RoboHelp Style Mappings dialog opens. In this dialog you can map each FrameMaker paragraph, cross reference, and character style to a RoboHelp style.

Select the type of style you want to map from the Style Mapping Type list. By default, the paragraph styles are selected. The individual paragraph styles found in the FrameMaker document and the RoboHelp project are displayed as shown in the screen-shot below. The FrameMaker styles are listed in the left column; the RoboHelp styles are listed in the right column. By default, each RoboHelp style is set to [source], which indicates that the FrameMaker style has not been mapped to a RoboHelp style. Preview of these styles is available in the bottom part of the dialog.

You may want to use different cross-reference styles in print form and Help deliverables. For example, page numbers are useful in PDF documents, but have no meaning in Online Help. You can map FrameMaker cross-reference formats to RoboHelp Cross Reference styles with appropriate definitions for online delivery.

For the screen-shot shown below, you may want to change the ‘Heading & Page’ cross-reference to paragraph text. Click Heading & Page to select the cross-reference style. The current definition includes a page number. Double-click to adjust the cross-reference format to specify only the title of the target topic.

I will touch other aspects in my next post. You can reach me at mahesh@adobe.com

Mahesh

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