Creating a Topic ID in FrameMaker for generating HTML help using Mif2Go

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Tue, 7 Jul 2009 19:30:20 +0200, Mark Soiseth <mark.soiseth at gmail.com> 
wrote:

>We use FrameMaker 8.0p277 to generate our manuals and then we use
>Mif2Go to generate HTML help from the same files.
>
>The system works but now they want to introduce a few topic IDs. In
>other words, they want the help button, in certain circumstances, to
>open the HTML help at certain topics.

That is best done using "aliases".

>I understand how that works, but I'm quite sure that Mif2Go generates
>the topic IDs each time it generates the HTML help. Therefore, the
>topic ID may be internally valid, but might not be the same from one
>build of the help to the next. They would need to know what the topic
>ID is before they build the software but, because the help is built
>after the application, it would not work.

Wrong.  If you are talking about filenames of type "aa123456.htm",
they *are* persistent.  In fact, the only way you can get them to
change is to delete the starting head for the file and recreate it.
See User's Guide par. 17.4.1.1, "Keeping split and extract file 
names unique".  But that really doesn't matter, because you can
use aliases rather than filenames in HTML Help (and in other Help
formats too).

>Is there any way I can set a secondary topic ID in FrameMaker that
>Mif2Go will keep? I seem to recall having read a long time ago that I
>could set a certain type of marker with defined content (such as
>"HelpTopic"). And that Mif2Go would use that marker to create a topic
>ID.
>
>Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Yes.  ;-)  It's fully explained in par. 8.11, "Setting up CSH for 
HTML Help".  CSH means "context-sensitive help", and that's what
you are talking about here.

HTH!
-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/