I changed all the styles, except the headings, to Normal with a font of Arial 9. That may not have been necessary, but I felt getting rid of all the old baggage would prevent potential problems. I wanted to get rid of all the paragraph styles used in the FrameMaker files and make the Word file as "clean" as possible. Each heading is automatically changed to Heading 1 and is made a topic title for the online help. When a Word file is then converted to RoboHelp, the existing font sizes and types are maintained. Paragraph and font styles from FrameMaker files carried over into Word files. Since I had previously named the FrameMaker files to reflect their function, the name of the Word files would remain the same. The process was painless, unless a graphic or two was accidentally left in. Once the graphics were removed, I simply saved the files as Word files. Many of those graphics would probably not be used in the online help or would not fit into the help format, so their removal was not a problem. Since our manual includes of numerous screen shots, as well as small graphics to indicate such things as mouse movement and warnings, it was necessary to strip all of them from each FrameMaker file. If a FrameMaker file has any pictures or graphics included, you cannot easily convert that file to Word. It consists of converting the FrameMaker files to Microsoft Word and then reformatting the text in Word to make it easy to use in RoboHelp. The process of converting a book written in FrameMaker to the format suitable for using with RoboHelp is relatively straightforward. Indexed items in FrameMaker automatically follow the conversion into RoboHelp. This was very important, since the index is the most used feature of online help. During the writing, words and phrases were marked for indexing. When put into WinHelp, each section results in one or more help topic.īefore starting, special paragraph styles were used in the FrameMaker book to maintain consistency and to aid the documentation, and fonts were selected for aesthetic appeal. Most of those sections include a procedure, with several screen shots. The manual is approximately 450 pages long and has over 250 sections. The purpose of our user manual is to show how to use the numerous job costing windows, as well as the navigation between them. The continuity of file names used in the manual and online help proved useful in keeping track of material. This arrangement-with the descriptive naming of the files-was also applied to the help project. The FrameMaker book was divided into files for each of the major areas of the menu, such as job maintenance, entering transactions and viewing job status. The structure of the manual is based on the hierarchical arrangement of the application's menu system. There are over 200 windows available for displaying job data, and each window requires its own procedure in the user manual. This is a complex application that allows the user to drill down on data in a window and go to sub-windows for further detail. The menu opens numerous windows or forms for entering or viewing data. The application's menu system is arranged according to job cost functions or activities of the user. It allows managers to keep track of such items as material, labor, and subcontractor fees. This product helps service companies-such as in the construction industry-monitor the costs of their projects. The user manual was written for a job costing software application. It is important to know what the product does and what its user manual is supposed to achieve before proceeding to the development of the online help. This paper provides a case study of the process used to create online help for their product, including the relationship of their product and its user manual, how I converted FrameMaker to RoboHelp and how I developed online help content from the user manual. After writing a large user manual in FrameMaker for a Wisconsin-based software company, they decided they needed online help for their software product and wanted it done in RoboHelp.
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