Authoring Home Page

To an extent, this page duplicates the Authoring and RoboHelp menus. However, it does make it easier to see what they cover.

What's covered?

Topic

Covers

AIR Help How AIR Help works.
Articles, Blogs and Suchlike A list of particularly useful sources of information for authoring generally and for working with RoboHelp.

Auto Expand Dropdown Text

This topic describes two methods of creating a link to another topic and opening it with a particular dropdown or expanding text hotspot displayed.

Browsers Some of the problems seen with non IE browsers.

Calling Webhelp

This topic covers

  • Calling WebHelp using URLs
  • Calling WebHelp using Map IDs
  • Calling Merged WebHelp using Map IDs
  • Calling WebHelp using Topic IDs

CHM Files Not Working

This topic covers the issues caused by Microsoft Security Update MS05-026.

Customising Help

This topic covers the issues surrounding the request from customers to have customised help.

It covers a nice method of providing links to their documentation or intranets so that the links only show in the help if the customer enters the path.

The topic also links to

  • A topic on terminology to cover different customers wanting to use different terms for the same thing, for example Depot / Warehouse.
  • An alternative method which also allows the customer to set up bubble text over such words or any other word in the help.
Dropdowns Methods of creating dropdown text that will work in any editor.

Eclipse

Think of Windows Explorer just showing you the files and folders you use without all the stuff others have on the network, and then being able to say, now I only want to see the files and folders for Project X. That's what Eclipse can give you. Also you can launch all your programs from it. On top of that, it's free, but don't think it's lightweight.

Highlighting Search Results

Description of Calvin Ly's method of highlighting search results in webhelp.

HTML

Covers some of the problem areas regularly seen on the RoboHelp forum.

Importing Word Documents

This topic now covers the X5 import wizard in detail as well as still showing how I import troublesome Word documents and M J Plaster's classic topic on using the RoboHelp 2002 import wizard.

Installing and Activating RoboHelp

Problems encountered installing and activating RoboHelp

Links to dropdown and expanding text

How to create a link to dropdown and / or expanding text in another topic so that the text is displayed for the user.

Javahelp Basics

An introduction to JavaHelp.

Javascript Basics

A bit of information from my look into the world of javascript.

Lowercase - Changing file names to

How to change your file names and hyperlinks to lowercase.

Merging WebHelp

Guides to working with merging help and a method that avoids the problem of links between the parent project and the child projects.

Opening Projects

Ways of opening projects with corrupt files or in an earlier version of RoboHelp

Password Protecting a Folder

How to password protect a folder on a Unix server.

Publishing WebHelp

How to keep your server neat and tidy.

Printed Output

A guide to how to produce printed output and deal with some of the frequently encountered problems.

Procedures and Style Guide The internal procedures and style guide used by CedarOpenAccounts

Regular Expressions

If you write your own expressions to find string patterns, this is a table setting out the characters used.

Reverse Engineering

Sometimes you only have the output files for webhelp or a compiled chm file and nobody can locate the source files. This topic covers how to recover from that situation.

Reviewing Help

Methods of making topics available to reviewers, including the use of Macromedia's Contribute product.

Right to Left Help How to (ab)use RoboHelp to produce help for right to left languages.
RoboHelp Tour What's new and changed in the latest version of RoboHelp plus information about other features of RoboHelp.
Searching with ZoomSearch How to improve you search page with Google like results and multiple search options including searches outside your project.
SharePoint An entry level article on getting help working in SharePoint 2007
Snippets Odds and ends that can be lifesavers.
Standard Text A method of inserting one topic inside another to give standard paragraphs. Not without some issues.
Tables

How to allow users to sort table rows by clicking the column headings and how to highlight rows on mouseover.

How to add preformatted tables to the preformatted tables supplied with RoboHelp.

Topic Editors

How to set up RH to automatically open different topics in different editors.

TOC Width

How to change the width of the TOC, Index and Search frame.

Twisties and Show / Hide

Shows how to emulate a Lotus Notes twisty where an arrow changes direction to highlight dropdown text, plus Show All / Hide All buttons.

Useful Links

Various sites that I have found useful.

Word Master TOC

How to create a Contents section spanning a number of Word documents.

Word Macros

Various word macros to make life that bit easier.

X5 Baggage Bug What to do when RoboHelp will not automatically add baggage files.

X5 Keywords Bug

How to deal with an X5 bug when importing topics from earlier versions with keywords stored in the topic.

Topic Revisions

I have removed the revisions log from this page as it was effectively a sub-set of what is in What's New?