FrameMaker MIF to RTF

Now that you’ve started a topic, you’ll want to add keywords, jumps, and popups. We turn your Frame index markers into keywords automatically (changing their multi-level coding to conform to that of WinHelp), but you can specify more keywords by applying an “AddKey” character style to words in the text. When we see that, we make a K footnote for you with a clone of the text. If you have a character style already in your catalog that you’ve applied to keywords, perhaps a form of emphasis, you can add it to the .ini file so that everything marked with it becomes a WinHelp keyword too. This can save hours of labor.

You’ve got a big head start on jumps if you’re already using cross-references and hypertext markers, because we convert those automatically too, even across topic-file boundaries. That includes the generated hyperlinks in your Frame Table of Contents and Index. You can add more jumps, popups, and their references the same way as keywords, by applying character styles such as “JumpRef”, “PopRef”, and “AddJRef” to the jump text and the matching target (reference) text.

One potential problem is that each Ref (context string) must be unique in the Help file. What if you have the same term used in several different topics, where the place to jump to, or the text to pop up, changes for each topic? We solve this with local references; all you do is use a “local” variant of the character format, such as “AddJLRef”, and we make up your context string by joining the topic’s browse identifier with your text. Now all those references are guaranteed unique to your topic; problem solved, painlessly.

About those popups. . . WinHelp requires you to put all the popups for a topic at the end of that topic. (If they have references from other topics too, that's fine, they will work.) Each popup needs to be in its own paragraph, with an "AddPRef" or "AddPLRef" character format applied to text somewhere in it (not necessarily at the start). We put the page breaks required by the Help compiler before each popup for you. If the popup is not already at the end of its topic, the filter moves it there for you.

Similarly, if you want to use existing figures and tables as topics of their own, a good idea, you can identify them in the .ini file as "sliding" topics, and the filter will move them to the end of the containing topic too! No need to use conditional text to get the change in placement you need; it's all automatic. The filter will also move table titles to the top (or bottom) of their tables, if you want to change that positioning systematically.

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