Chunking FM files into Topics for RH

[Nancy Allison]

Hi, all. I'm using FM 10 and RH 9 on a Windows 7 system.

I see that there are at least two ways to chunk .fm content into separate .html topics when you import a FrameMaker project into RoboHelp:

1. When setting up the import of .fm files, set the pagination value to a heading level; topics begin at each new instance of that heading level.

2. Create custom markers to identify the beginning of a topic. Question: How do you indicate the end of the topic?



I've found that with technique #1, because subheading levels do not follow a rigid scheme in our unstructured documents, I have to use a lot of conditional text and some additional paragraph tags to fool RoboHelp into combining several subsections that it wants to separate.

I haven't tried technique #2. Does anyone use it? There has to be a way to indicate the end of each topic you mark -- can you tell me what it is? Given that you can scope out topics in the .FM file, I assume there's a lot less need for conditional text. Do you find this to be so? Are there any pitfalls to this method?

Is there any other approach to chunking text that I'm missing?

Thanks for all advice. 

--Nancy