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I am using the Tech Comm Suite with Robohelp 7. I have single-sourced a FrameMaker 8 book into Robohelp, and periodically update the content of the book within FrameMaker and refresh it within Robohelp. I am using the WebHelp Single Source Layout. I have in Tools > Options the "Use underscores in file names" option checked.
My company and I were unsatisfied with the Search Engine that came bundled with this product so I incorporated WrenSoft's Zoom Search using Peter Grainge's instructions on his site (with some minor modifications for my own environment) and made the output look a lot like Google. [Thanks Peter!]
Here is my problem. I would like to have the topic titles derived from the top-level heading on the page WITHOUT the underscores so that when it is returned from the search it looks good. I have tried changing a single topic title using its properties, but this would be overwritten whenever I regenerate the help from the FrameMaker source. Doing this through properties every time I update the content would be unworkable. The TOC takes the headings for the topics without the underscores correctly and the output otherwise looks good. The search tool just derives the topic titles with the underscores. (Maybe this is something I can do within the Zoom Search scripts? Is there a way to change all the topic titles within Robohelp to lose the underscores?)
Anyway, I'm mostly happy with the output, but if I could solve this one problem with the search returning topic titles with underscores, then it would truly be golden. Thanks.
-Katie
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Hi there
I'm hoping Peter joins in on this. But my gut reaction to this is to ask if you are certain that you are seeing Topic Titles? From what you described, it would seem you are seeing Topic File Names.
Cheers... Rick
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Thanks for your quick reply. I'm positive that it's the page title that Zoom Search is returning. (In the Results Layout options for Zoom Search, I asked it to return the page title as the top result link, just as you see in Google.) The topic titles within all the Robohelp-generated html documents have the underscores. They basically duplicate the filename without the extension. But for whatever reason, the auto-generated TOC in Robohelp will get titles without the underscores. That's the title I want returned by the search.
I can possibly strip out the underscores by modifying the search script for the Zoom Search engine, but it would be better if there were a Robohelp or FrameMaker solution to this problem.
-Katie
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When you create a topic in RH, it does not add underscores to the topic title, only the filename and then only if you select that option. So my guess is that this is occurring when you import / link FM documents.
You need to look at the options when importing / linking to see if that can be prevented.
I just added underscores to a topic title and autocreated a TOC. The underscore was in the TOC.
Something is not right here.
Can you post some screenshots? Use the camera icon above, not the attach files link.
See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips
Message was edited by: Peter Grainge - NOT added to first line
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I fear this is going to get ugly trying to explain my screwy process, but here goes. I used the instructions provided by the Tech Comm Suite Training Part 1 to originally import my FrameMaker book by reference so I could make changes within the book and have it re-imported into RoboHelp and generated when I'm all done with the new content. I have had to create a few extra paragraph and char styles to overcome some small bugs within Robohelp 7 but the process is pretty good now. My company wants a disclaimer added to each and every page and I hate the image toolbar in IE (appears over screen shots) so I do a little post-processing to make this all work. My general process is this:
1. Update content in FrameMaker.
2. Launch Robohelp 7 which re-syncs to the book and brings in any new content.
3. Regenerate the help.
4. From the Topic List window, apply the Footer.htt template to all the topics. (This adds the disclaimer to every page.)
5. Search and replace (via UltraEdit) to add the meta tag to suppress the image toolbar and prevent printing of the help via div ids and css. (Silly I know to make printing inconvenient, but I'm just following orders and trying to make the product manager happy.)
Here is what my RoboHelp HTML setup looks like:
I am viewing the Topic List by Topic Name here.
You can see from the TOC lists (maybe... as they are pretty small) that the one on the left I have organized into top-level "chapter" topics which did not come from the TOC autogen in FrameMaker b/c I couldn't figure out how NOT to get the chapter numbers next to them w/o suppressing them altogether. Anyway, I only need to set these TOC changes up once and correct the sequence of topics and then they seem to stay and require no further fussing. Here is what my output looks like with the search:
Okay, it's hard to see this inside this message, but the underlines are given in the search results and otherwise everything is good.
I think probably the best short-term solution is to replace line 1172 in Zoom Search's search.js as follows:
Replace:
pgtitle = pagedata[ipage][PAGEDATA_TITLE];
With:
pgtitle_temp = pagedata[ipage][PAGEDATA_TITLE];
pgtitle = pgtitle_temp.replace(/_/g," ");
This does strip out the underscores in the search output and get me 98% of the way there, but I'd really like to know what's going wrong with the page titles in the RoboHelp generation process and see if there is a way to get the chapter titles in there without fiddling with the TOC. This description is probably not going to help you much to determine the real source of my problem, since it appears I have several issues that have dovetailed off one another, but you guys on this forum are great. (I called the help desk once, sat on hold for a bit, got someone in India who had never used the product, and after some waste of time, thankfully FOUND THIS WONDERFUL FORUM.)
-Katie
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Let's just stick with the underscore problem for now.
Somewhere RH is picking up those underscores and the goal is to find out where and prevent it. I don't know FM but maybe we can work on this together?
I am reminded of a fellow commuter many years ago, a forensic scientist. He taught me to keep any problem as simple as possible so I always work on small projects to resolve problems like this. What I need you to do is produce a much smaller FM document. Perhaps just the one you are using stripped of all but say two chapters. Then I want you to import that into RH to ensure the problem persists. With that it should be a lot easier to see what is going on.
Then I would like you to screenshot each step in the linking process so that I can see what settings you are applying. The simplest thing is if you pop those screenshots into a Word document.
Zip the whole lot up and send it via http://www.cutesendit.com. You can get my address from my site. Please include a link to this thread.
This is new territory for me so I cannot guarantee a result but I'll do my best.
See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips
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Hi all
I'm wondering if the recent Adobe Blog post will assist in any way with this?
Cheers... Rick
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Rick,
Lamentably the feature described in the blog is only offered in Robohelp 8 (TCS2). But it looks like a very useful feature. I have RH7 (TCS1) so I'm somewhat limited by that. I've thought about upgrading, but doing so incurs risk so I haven't yet. Thanks for alerting me to another resource for finding answers though.
-Katie
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Hi Katie
I wasn't sure which versions were being referred to here. I had hopes that what they talked about would be present in both versions.
Then again, I'm not a Frame user. I had just seen the article and this thread was a bit fresh in my mind. So I had hopes it may help you out. Sigh...
Sorry it failed to help. I hope you get it sorted... Rick
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Rick,
No worries. I have output that I can live with by stripping out the
underscores returned by the search with a bit of a hack. RoboHelp requires
me to do some tedious TOC and sequence configuring whenever I add
completely new content in FM and I need to do a lot more post-processing
than I would prefer, but it's worked out more or less okay.
I was able to get WebWorks to generate perfectly from FM in a previous job
without any post-processing or problems, but opted for the TCS package for
this job. If the upgrade to TCS2 weren't so expensive, I might give it a
whirl. In any case, I appreciate your help. Peter is going to take a look
at how I link the files from Frame to see if there are any clues there.
-Katie
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This will take me a while to do. I have output that looks good by using the search engine to strip out the underscores. It's a cheat, though, so I will get back to this. I just need to do a couple of other things first. I'm sure to learn some more about FM/RH integration in the process of this exercise. Stay tuned. And thanks!
-Katie
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Peter has ascertained that this problem with underscores showing up for each topic title is a bug in TCS1 that does not occur in TCS2. Upgrading would solve the problem completely. Barring that, to work around it I correct the topic titles for each of the Heading1 topics by hand (there is only one per chapter in the original FrameMaker doc) via the Properties for each and strip out all remaining underscores using the Zoom Search Engine script as follows:
Replace line 1172 in Zoom Search's search.js as follows:
Replace:
pgtitle = pagedata[ipage][PAGEDATA_TITLE];
With:
pgtitle_temp = pagedata[ipage][PAGEDATA_TITLE];
pgtitle = pgtitle_temp.replace(/_/g," ");
This strips out the underscores in the search output thus making it look right, but the solution is more work-intensive than I'd prefer, and a bit of a hack. Note that you should backup the "fixed" search.js file because every time you reindex the help, it will overwrite the updated script with the original.
-Katie
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I'm in TCS2.0 and it happens as well. I will admit that I'm building a new project and tinkering with RH 8.0 to test integration but this is one element that appears to be different than RH 7.0 results. The structure of the title is exactly the title of the filename, not the topic title. I am hoping some loverly developer provided an option for us to specify topic title versus filename, but am not hopeful. Katie's hack, should I find a way to add it into the RH javascript won't work as there are other strings we would have to strip from the filename.
?
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Hi starrd,
If you're building a new project with TCS2 you might want to check out the source provided by Captiv8r (Rick), duplicated below.
http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2009/06/robohelpframemaker_integration_some_tips.html
You may be able to use this Topic Name Marker functionality. With TCS1 I don't have it as an option. But if your source file isn't too big, this seems like it would give you a lot of control over exactly what you want the topic names to be in the final compiled project. Worth a look. I'm told that the RoboHelp search was much improved in TCS2, so it may work somewhat differently than before. I integrated the WrenSoft Zoom Search Engine to deal with the inadequacies of the TCS1 search implementation. This had the unintended consequence of giving me an easy regular expression javascript hack to my specific problem.
Anyway, good luck!
-Katie
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Hi Katie:
It would require us putting topic markers in all of our headings in all of the existing docs. A bit of a pain. But yes, there is a solution, it's just painful.
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Just to clarify one thing that may seem a bit of operator error in my screenshot above - The linked filenames were automatically generated. I did override the above using a building block tags ( <$paratext>) to remove the chapter name from the file, but the underscores are automatically added and used for both the filename and the topic title. And although it would be prohibitively expensive, one conceivably edit all the topic titles manually -- however, you aren't allowed to do that for linked files. So, arguably, Adobe ought to provide a means to specify the syntax of the topic titles for linked files.
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Ok. Newbie talking to myself. I will learn to just be quiet until I've beaten my head against the wall and tried Peter's original suggestion of keeping it simple. I noticed that my H1 tags were mangled and H2 were not, which sent me down the path of simplification....I created two copies of same book with some simple tags and imported one and linked the other. No content to speak of, no style sheet changes, no custom skin, just pagination on the two heading tags. <deep breath> It works fine. In the image below, you can see that all the headings in the project files list show up with no underscores, regardless of the link vs import type; and the linked filenames do have underscores which do not appear in the search results.
So something in the content is mucking somehow with RH's parsing of the names, causing it to perceive underscores where there are none. More mysteries to diagnose, but at least it appears that RH is not inserting underscores in all cases, so this should be fixable by ..um...the operator (me).
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Ahhh yes...
Surprising how often the KISS approach will save the day!
KISS=Keep It Surprisingly Simple
One of my favorites aside from RTFM.
RTFM=Read The Friendly Manual
Cheers... Rick
Helpful and Handy Links |
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I am using Robohelp 8 HTML I upgraded from Robohelp 7. Since the upgrade in April I have had the same problem you have and have learned to live with it. What do you mean by the term TCS2 ?
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Adobe Technical Communication Suite version2
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I don't use that.
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It's just a package of 4 apps which includes FM8 and RH8. To get rid of the
underscores, I have to hand change all the topic titles. I use TCS version
1 (FM8 + RH7). It's a total nuisance. I'm considering going back to
WebWorks which required a lot less post processing. But I have to convince
my company that it's worth it first. Sigh.
-Katie
From: rwrich21 <forums@adobe.com>
To: Katherine Barnes/NYC/US/INSTINET@Instinet
Date: 11/10/2009 09:49 AM
Subject: Topic titles with underscores returned by the search
I don't use that.
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When you change the Topic titles, how do you mean?
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I right click on each topic and select Properties. (Topics are listed in
the Topic List tab of the Output View window). Then I change the topic
title to take out the spaces. I could upgrade to TCS2 and go through a fair
amount of work to make this unnecessary, but I'd still have a lot of
post-processing I'd have to do to address the requirements of the product
managers here. I just try to be patient and methodical as I fix my output
for now.
-Katie
From: rwrich21 <forums@adobe.com>
To: Katherine Barnes/NYC/US/INSTINET@Instinet
Date: 11/10/2009 10:07 AM
Subject: Topic titles with underscores returned by the search
When you change the Topic titles, how do you mean?
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Katie
Could you take a look at how your posts come out on the forum please? I suspect that the garbage is because you are leaving the orginal post in when you reply. If that is it, could you please trash it from your replies as it is confusing. Thanks.
See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips
Follow me @petergrainge