How to convert FrameMaker TOC in RoboHelp

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

Table of Contents (TOC) is an important part of FrameMaker books. RoboHelp recognizes this importance and allows the conversion of your source FrameMaker TOC to the corresponding TOC in RoboHelp.

I’ll explain the steps with an example. At the time of importing/linking FrameMaker book,

1. Place a check in the ‘ConvertFrameMaker Table of Contents’ box in the Content Settings dialog.

2. Click to open the Browse FrameMaker file dialog.

3. Navigate to the source files folder, select the source TOC and click ‘Open’. By Default, the TOC path would be populated with the first TOC file in the book. If your book has multiple TOCs, you can choose the one of your interest.

4. Select the Create new associated TOC radio button. This will create a RoboHelp TOC for the imported FrameMaker topics.

5. Enter a name for the this TOC. For our example, I have called it ‘TOC1’.

On completion of the import process, ‘TOC1’ would be created under ‘Table of Contents’ folder in the ‘Project Manager’ pod as shown below.

Double clicking ‘TOC1’ would open the TOC.

Snap-shot of the source TOC is shown below. We see that ‘Filter By Attribute’ is a book in the RoboHelp TOC. Topics under this book are same and in the same order as in the source TOC.

The styles in your FrameMaker TOC determine which headings become books, sub-books, or pages in the RoboHelp TOC. These levels are based on the following elements in the decreasing order of priority:

Note: Headings with indented items are converted to book entries.

In Adobe RoboHelp 7, a project can have multiple TOCs, multiple indexes and multiple glossaries. In addition to creating multiple TOCs and indexes, RoboHelp also provides an ability to create a hierarchical structure of TOCs and indexes. For more information, please visit my following blog post

http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2007/10/content_aggregation_workflow_i_1.html

– Mahesh

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