Summary of the Electronic Documentation SIG Meeting

Held February 11, 1998 on Single-sourcing Technique with Adobe FrameMaker and Microsoft Word

Presenter: Jean Little.

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Jean spoke to 33 people about a demo she had with Gabriel Lanyi of Characters Corporation about a method to single-source documents. Specifically, Jean described how to perform a single-source operation with FrameMaker as the parent document, and WinHelp (Microsoft Word topics) as the output "child" set of topics. Once the single-sourcing structure is setup, subsequent easy output to the WinHelp topics can be achieved.

The following steps summarize the procedure Jean used to create a single document that can be printed and then exported as .RTF and compiled into Windows Help, or saved as HTML. Jean noted that it is important to do some up-front thinking about the document structure for both the print and the help topics before you begin.

1. Build the document in FrameMaker, inserting Custom Footnotes, underlining for jumps and pop-ups, and strikethrough for target topic IDs and other text that will be hidden online. Use one condition for Print and another for Online.
2. Hide the online condition and print the document.
3. Save the document under a different name in another FrameMaker directory.
4. Delete the text that is conditionalized for Print only, and convert the Online condition to text.
5. Apply an online template (you make) containing all the formatting for the Help topics.
6. Save the document in Rich Text Format.
7. Open the .RTF file in Microsoft Word, run a macro to convert Strikethrough to Hidden text, and apply an online style sheet.
8. Create a Contents file.
9. Compile the .RTF file.

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