RoboHelp Tutorial

1. From your Windows Start menu, choose Programs | RoboHelp | RoboHelp HTML.

Tip! There are several fields within this dialog box requiring similar information. If you want to review the specific differences between your entries in these fields, press F1 to view field-by-field descriptions in the online Help file.

4. Enter the following information in the fields of the New Project Wizard dialog box; use the Tab key to move between the fields as you enter the information.

· Type RHTutor in the second field; notice that RHTutor is appended to the end of the path in the next field as you type.

· In the third field, edit the drive letter and path to a more useful location (e.g., the local hard drive or a floppy drive).

5. When you have completed all of the fields on the dialog box, select Finish.

Congratulations! You have just created your very first online Help project.

Adding topics and content to your project

As you are looking at the new project that you just created in RoboHelp, you see the Navigation pane on the left and your new topic titled Creating a Topic to the right.

Tip! Do not use quotation marks or contractions in online Help -- leave punctuation marks out whenever you possibly can. Use special formatting to replace “quoted” material.

Why? Help files break on punctuation marks. It isn
‘t uncommon to see these problems in online Help
. What can you do about it? Absolutely nothing..
. just try to minimize use of unnecessary punctuation.

To add content under Creating a Topic, simply position your cursor in the right pane (by clicking on it) and begin typing. You will find that this is a word-processing tool much like Word or WordPerfect. Delete the default topic content (First topic in project 'RoboHelp Tutor') and then type the following text:

You can initiate a new topic in RoboHelp in any one of the following ways:¶

Right-click HTML Files (Topics) in the Navigation Pane and then choose New Topic... from the shortcut menu. ¶

When you see the New Topic dialog box, type the name of the new topic in the Topic Title field and then select OK. ¶

Tip! If you do not see your paragraph markers, click the Show/Hide button on the toolbar (it has the ¶ symbol on it). This allows you to see hidden text in your topics and can help you find formatting problems. You should always work with your hidden characters displayed. If you are not accustomed to using this feature, it may seem strange at first, but it can save you some headaches down the road.

Take a moment and try to follow the instructions that you just typed. You may find them difficult to follow. Adding bullets to the second, third, and fourth lines will help clarify. Also, using different fonts on keystrokes or field names will help an experienced user scan the instructions for the basic information – What do I type, and where?

fORMATTING tEXT

The quickest and easiest way to add bullets to this topic is to highlight the affected lines of text and then select the Bulleted List button from the toolbar; however, this is not advised. Templates are an important part of building maintainability into your online Help system. It is best to create a bulleted style into your template (or style sheet).

Why is this so important? It is time to go home and tomorrow is your deadline. Your Help file is over 1000 topics long and your boss says, “Wouldn’t it be cute if you used one of these little images instead of those plain round bullets?” Now, if you built your document on text overrides, you may break down in tears. However, if you built your document with maintainability in mind, you can change the bullets across thousands of topics in a matter of seconds. So let’s create a bulleted style in our template and apply it to the text….

1. Highlight the lines of text to be bulleted (the second thru fifth lines of the topic text).

8. Choose OK in the New Styles dialog box and choose Apply in the Styles dialog box.

Congratulations! You just created and used your own customized style in the cascading style sheet.

So, how do you change the bullet style you just created? Modifying styles is very similar to creating them.

2. Highlight the style that you want to modify from the Styles list in the resulting dialog box.

4. In the Modify Style dialog box, select Format | Bullets and Numbering…

Adding an image to your Help file

As you read through the text of Creating a Topic, you may not have known where to find the New Topic button. In this case, it is helpful to include an image of the button. How? Well, in a perfect world, the programmers have provided you a file with all of the buttons and symbols that they used in the program. But most likely, you’ll have to create a screen shot, crop it, save it, and import it into the Help file.

Creating the screen shot

1. Press Ctrl + Print Scrn. This pastes a copy of your system desktop to the clipboard.

2. Paste the image into any image editor (you can usually use Ctrl + P to do this).

Exactly how you create your screen shot depends on the image editor or screen capture tool you use. Since Paint is available on all Windows machines, we will use Paint to get the button image we need for our Help project.

9. Click and drag the dot in the lower right corner of the white space to resize the image canvas. Resize it to the exact size of the button image.

10. Press Ctrl + S and, in the resulting dialog box, enter newTopic as the File name, specify C:\Temp as the location (or save it to your floppy), and then choose Save.

Adding an image to your help file

Position your cursor within Creating a Topic, just after the words New Topic on the second bulleted line. Type a space character and then arrow back one space, so that there is one space before your cursor, and one after.

Tip! There are always several ways to perform any task (e.g., keyboard, toolbar, menu bar), but the keyboard is always the fastest. To save time, learn the keyboard shortcuts or create your own.

2. Select the browse button to the right of the Image name field and browse to C:\Temp\newTopic.bmp.

5. Choose Yes in the resulting message box to copy the image into your Help project folder.

Creating Hyperlinks

Now you are ready to create hyperlinks to other topics in your online Help project. But you say you haven’t created any other topics? RoboHelp allows you to create the topics as you create the links. Here’s how:

1. Position your cursor at the end of your topic text and press Return a couple of times.

3. Click and drag over format your topic text to highlight it. This is the text on which we will create the hyperlink.

5. Create your new topic by choosing the New Topic button to the right of the Link to field (the same New Topic button you just made an image of).

· Select OK in the New Topic dialog box to create the new topic.
Notice that Creating a Style is already highlighted in the left-hand side of the Hyperlink dialog box.

6. Select OK in the Hyperlink dialog box to link the selected text to the highlighted topic.

Test your new hyperlink

Right-click within the topic to open a shortcut menu and then choose Preview Topic. In the resulting Help preview window, click on your link. If you created the link properly, you should jump to your new topic: Creating a Style.

Importing existing HTML files into your project

For the remainder of this exercise, we will import some pre-existing topics into your Help project. This will save time typing topic text and allow us to create a table of contents and index entries.

3. When the HTML files appear in the list, hold down the Ctrl key while clicking them to select them all.

5. Select Yes to All to add all of the necessary files to your project folder.

6. Select Yes to All to copy the associated cascading style sheet and select Yes to All again to confirm that you want to overwrite the existing default.css file. This adds the cascading style sheet associated with the files to your project. If you were working with a project for which you had created a custom CSS file, you would select No here.

7. Select Yes to All to confirm that you want to overwrite Creating_a_Topic.htm. In practice, use this carefully; you don’t want to overwrite more recent work.

You have now successfully imported the topics you will need for the rest of the exercise.

Creating a Table of Contents

1. Look below your topic text and find the tabs in the lower right corner. Select the Topics tab. This tab displays a list of all topics in your project.

2. At the bottom of the Navigation pane (on the left), select the TOC tab. You will see instructions for creating your Table of Contents in this tab.

· You can right-click in the Navigation pane and select Auto Create TOC… from the shortcut menu, and then select OK in the resulting dialog box. This is useful when you want to present a build to proofreaders with all of the topics listed in the TOC; however, it is not a very practical option for a deliverable Help file.

· You can right-click in the Navigation pane and select New | Book, New | Page, or New | Topic. Press F1 to read about and complete the resulting dialog boxes.

· You can drag-and-drop the topics from the Topics tab in the right pane into the TOC on the Navigation pane to create your TOC. When a topic is added to the TOC, its icon in the Topics tab turns a light aqua blue.

· Right-click in the Navigation pane and select New | Book from the shortcut menu.

4. Drag Creating_a_Topic.htm from the right pane to the TOC, and drop it under your new Topics book.

5. Drag Creating_a_Style.htm from the right pane, and drop it under your new Topics book just below Creating_a_Topic.htm.

6. Click to select the Topics book and then create a new book called Links. Selecting the previous book first places the new book on the same level. If you select one of the topics subordinate to the existing book, the new book will also be subordinate to it.

7. Drag Creating_a_Link.htm and Pop-up.htm and drop them under the new book.

8. Right-click Links in the TOC pane and choose New | Topic. Enter the topic title, Linking to an External Web Site and then choose OK.

If you create a topic in this manner, it is automatically added to the TOC. Now you can double-click the topic from the TOC to view and edit it in the WYSIWYG tab of the right pane.

Creating index entries

Index entries are maintained on a per-topic basis. You can use the Smart Index Wizard to create your index entries all at once, but it is advisable to maintain your index for each topic as you work. This will save time at the deadline date and ensure a more comprehensive index. Use the Smart Index Wizard to do a final check of your index when finalizing your project.

Tip! The most effective index keywords DO NOT appear in the topic text. The Search feature searches the actual words in the text. Your job when indexing is to think of absolutely anything related to the topic that a user might type in to search for the information.

1. From the TOC or project tab, double-click the topic to be indexed to open it in the right pane (Creating a Link for this example).

2. Right-click on the topic and choose Topic Properties… from the shortcut menu.

4. Type in all of the keywords that you can think of relating to the topic. For example, hyperlink, e-mail, link, Web address, jump, hotspot, etc.

6. Go to the Linking to an External Web Site topic and add the index keyword Web site.

7. Select the Index tab in the Navigation pane. Notice the two keywords Web address and Web site; they will both be found when the user searches for Web, and they mean the same thing, so they should be combined.

9. Select Yes in the message dialog to confirm that you want to merge the two keywords.

Notice that both of the topics are now listed at the bottom of the Index pane, because they are both associated with the selected keyword, Web site.

To learn more about indexing or to learn about the Smart Index Wizard, press F1 and search for the relevant topics in the RoboHelp online Help file.

Creating a New Project	Creating a Style	Spell Checking	Cascading Style Sheet	Tutorial Files
Creating a Topic	Creating a Link	Saving the Project	Popup

RoboHelp Demonstration

Creating an HTML Help project