Help Tools

[Davis, Jessica D.]

Pam,

The basic Web Works that shipped with Frame 7.2 may work for you *if*
you have all of the conversion templates from ePublisher and you don't
modify anything in the template that will break the conversion rules.
It's basically a compiler. The idea was you need one license of Pro to
build and maintain your conversion templates, then you distribute those
templates to other writers.  They could use the pre-defined templates
with the standard WebWorks option to generate help.

As for other conversion tools, there are several out there: Robohelp,
MifToGo, Madcap Flare.  

We currently are using MadCap Flare 5.something and it works, but it's
been a little painful getting everything to work correctly. The graphic
conversion settings are counter intuitive.  If you select the option to
not convert the graphics, which is usually what you do when you want to
preserve the quality, the graphics come out smooshed. Instead, you have
to tell it to convert and then you set up a PDF job options with super
high quality graphic rendering parameters and have it use those job
options.  There's also a known issue in which Flare doesn't like
non-breaking characters, so we have to import templates before the
online help build to replace all variables and x-ref formats with
versions that do not contain non-breaking characters.  It's kind of a
pain and their tech support didn't seem to understand the problem or the
work around, but they told me they opened an issue for it. The forums
seem to know more about the product than the tech support department.
I'm thinking about using FrameScript to automate this preparation task.

I've heard good things about Mif2Go and Robohelp.

Thanks,
Jess



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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:38:59 -0400
From: Pam Reichert <pam.reichert at vpisystems.com>
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Help Tools
Message-ID: <f5d54d495e100c8a07574fe0444bbb40 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252

I have been using WebWorks epublisher Pro version 9.2 to convert our
FrameMaker documents into online help for our applications.  Recently my
laptop started having problems and they are moving me to a new laptop.
The
writer who installed epublisher on my laptop is no longer with the
company
and we can?t find the CD with a serial number.  I noticed a version of
WebWorks comes on the FrameMaker 7.2 CD but it is called WebWorks
Standard.
I thought maybe this is where the WebWorks came from.  Is WebWorks
Standard
the same as  ePublisher pro?  Even if it is, no serial number I find on
any
of our CDs seems to work with it and Adobe can?t seem to help me.  When
I go
to the WebWorks page I can?t get help there either because I don?t have
a
maintenance contract.  I don?t think WebWorks actually *wants*
customers.
 When I try to find out how much it costs to buy a new copy, no prices
are
listed unless you have a sales person call you.   We don?t have phones
in
our office.



I am pretty fed up with it all and am thinking of moving the help to a
new
platform.  Can you suggest another help platform that works well with
FrameMaker files and looks similar to ePublisher?  I need to produce
online
help in both .chm files and html files.



Pam Reichert


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