RE: single-sourcing/robohelp/framemaker

[Juliet Adlington <Juliet -dot- Adlington -at- reuters -dot- com>]

Thanks to everyone for their comments and useful links.

I was particularly interested in Bill's comment regarding
single-sourcing/repurposing.

> - When I contacted Macromedia they 
> told me that there is a plug-in, included in the latest version of 
> RoboHelp, that enables users to convert to mif and then import in to 
> RoboHelp.

> - But then you're repurposing content and not single-sourcing. These
are two distinctly different concepts and they should not be confused
for each other or mistaken for the same thing. See
http://www.stcsig.org/ss/articles062002/6_02_when_to_ss.htm for an
overview (sorry for the shameless plug).


As I said before I have used FrameMaker and WebWorks before, and so am
used to being able to create documention in FrameMaker and then create
an online help with the same information using WebWorks. From what I'd
read, and from Macromedia's response, I assumed that it was more or less
the same with RoboHelp. Except that there was an interim stage
converting the files to mif because RoboHelp can't deal with fm files.

>From your response I assume that once the information from FrameMaker is
in RoboHelp there is a lot of manual work to be done, in order to get
the online help? Hence making it, as you say, repurposing instead of
single-sourcing. This is very important for us, as we do want to
single-source: pdfs and online help from a single source without
editing/manual reworking etc. You say you converted to rtf. I was
wondering if you tried the mif method as well?

Thanks

Juliet 




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