Searching Online Help and PDFs

[NMoriarty]

Hi,

I generate an online help system from RoboHelp 8 which also contains PDFs of some User Guides. Ideally I would like the user to be able to search for information in both the HTML pages and the PDFs (written and compiled using FrameMaker 9). Is there any way this is possible?

Thanks

[RoboColum_n_]

You can do this with RH8 but only using the WebHelp Pro or FlashHelp Pro output options and publishing the output to the RoboHelp Server.

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The RoboColum(n)

@robocolumn

Colum McAndrew

[NMoriarty]

I don't use RoboHelp Server so will have to investigate this

Thanks

[Peter Grainge]

I thought that if the topics have a link to the PDF and the PDF is in baggage files, then a webhelp search would find it without needing RoboHelp Server. Try it.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[NMoriarty]

Sadly Peter this doesn't work.

I have now discovered a problem with the search facility which I hadn't noticed. If you put a word, for example 'hat' in the search box, all

pages with larger words containing it are returned. In this scenario I entered 'hat' and got about forty pages returned that contain the word 'that' .

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

Indeed Peter is spot on. A few months back we had another person that wanted this and I recall testing. As long as there was a link to the PDF from a topic, content inside the PDF was found.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7, 8 or 9 within the day! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[NMoriarty]

I will try this again.

[NMoriarty]

OK I've tried this again without result. Just to clarify:

Using Adobe RoboHelp 8.0
Generating WebHelp Pro

Contains links to PDFs (both in the TOC and in a topic)

PDFs are baggage files

Anything I am missing?

[Captiv8r]

Hello again

Earlier in the thread you stated you were not using RoboHelp Server. WebHelp Pro is an output intended for use with RoboHelp Server. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the WebHelp Pro output doesn't function to search inside the PDF because that's typically a function of the Server software. Try generating basic WebHelp output and test again.

Searching inside content such as PDF used to be only something available with WebHelp Pro and the Server piece. Later they built in the ability for plain vanilla WebHelp to do it.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7, 8 or 9 within the day! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[Peter Grainge]

Unless you are publishing to a server with RoboHelp Server installed, you should be generating WebHelp, not WebHelp Pro.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

On "hat" and "that" - turn off substring searching.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[NMoriarty]

Thanks! I am just back from maternity leave (been off a year) so not sure why we are now using Webhelp Pro and not Webhelp. I have a feeling it has happened by accident when we upgraded to RoboHelp 8.

I really appreciate all the speedy feedback. You are all very efficient

[NMoriarty]

I have read that you need to have iFilter installed. I have downloaded this from Adobe however it still doesn't seem to work. Any other settings I have missed?

[Peter Grainge]

I haven't heard of iFilter so I am dubious this is a RoboHelp requirement. Is there a link?

Please state which help output you are using as I'm not certain.

If it is WebHelp Pro, try generating WebHelp locally and see if the search works there.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[kmaddox1]

FWIW, http://forums.adobe.com/message/3163589#3163589 describes a related problem I've been having with searching  PDFs in Webhelp output. If I generate the webhelp (not pro) to my local computer, I can search the pdfs. However, once we use the robohelp command line option to generate the help as part of our software build process, the PDFs in the baggage files are no longer searchable. I don't know if this is the same root problem as what you describe, but I did submit a bug request to Adobe.

[Peter Grainge]

Kathy

Thanks for reminding us about the command line bug.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[NMoriarty]

I read about ifilter and it is a plugin for older versions of Adobe Reade. It comes with Reader Version 8 onwards. It is actually nothing to do with RoboHelp (a bit of a red herring) it allows you to use the Microsoft Search facility to search within PDFs.

[Peter Grainge]

... and the other outstanding points?

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[NMoriarty]

I have compiled the project in Webhelp and had some progress. A PDF that was recently added is now included in the search but PDFs that were included by a previous version of RoboHelp are not included in the search. The upgrade of RoboHelp was whilst I was on maternity leave and from what I can gather there were some problems with upper and lower case file names (due to the compiled help running on a Linux system). PDFs were renamed but I am not sure how or where.

I think there may be a problem with RoboHelp not recogmising the PDFs as baggage files. I plan to remove one of the PDFs and add it to the project again to see if that works. I will let you know once I resolve the problem as I think I am close to assertaining the cause.

Thanks for all your help.

Nicola

[NMoriarty]

The problem was with the baggage files and I now have an online help system which is searching both the topics and the PDFs. I could not remove the baggage files from within RoboHelp (when I right-clicked on a baggage file the Delete function was greyed out). I had to manually delete them from rhbag.apj then add them to the project again.

Glad this is fixed!

Thanks for all the advice.

[NMoriarty]

To cofirm the solution:

If you have added PDFs to the TOC (which RoboHelp happily lets you do) then these are excluded from the search (even if you also have a hyperlink to them in a topic).

You are also unable to delete them from the list of baggage files (the delete option is greyed out)

Putting PDFs in the TOC is not recommended as it does weird stuff to the databases!