FrameMaker lists aren't being converted correctly

[Rowanna]

I'm trying out the trial version of RoboHelp 6 HTML. I'm saving my FrameMaker files in .mif format, and then importing them into RoboHelp. For the most part, the formatting seems to be pretty good. However, numbered and bulleted lists aren't recognized as HTML lists by RoboHelp; they come across as paragraphs starting with bullet symbols or hard-coded numbers. The formatting is a little off, which is why I noticed this. The first line of the list text does not line up with the wrapped lines below it. It contains extra spaces at the beginning of the text, and removing the spaces still doesn't fix the problem. Has anyone else encountered this? Am I doing something wrong?

[MergeThis]

RH X5.0.2 didn't do any better with lists when importing Word files, either. My guess is, that the fault lies equally between RH and the third-party product whose files are being imported. That is, any number of authors may have used any number of unorthodox formatting gymnastics to achieve bulleted and numbered lists, and RH concerns itself with only the approved, default methods.

We found that performing much of our cleanup in the Word files prior to importing, went a long way towards making our transition smoother (target output was a 42-project merged WebHelp output of ~2400 topics).

Perhaps some FrameMaker users can add more detailed suggestions.


Good luck,
Leon

[RoboColum_n_]

I'm afraid not. I'm not a power Framemaker user but as Leon suggests it does seem to depend on how clean the document is with regards to styles before the import.

[Rowanna]

Thanks guys. As far as I know, I'm using the cleanest-possible, approved way to create lists in FrameMaker. I'm hoping that, now that Adobe owns RoboHelp, they'll work on this problem. Maybe future versions of FrameMaker will address it. One can always hope for a truly seamless conversion to HTML sometime in the future 🙂