Workarounds for Hebrew or Arabic

[JustinKelley]

I know that Flare doesn't officially support Hebrew or Arabic, but I've looked at some threads on this forum and have noticed that there are some current Flare customers who have Arabic and Hebrew deliverables. I was wondering how some people are getting around it. Has anyone found a hack that's worked to deliver online and printed content for R-L languages?

I found this item when googling for R-L language support with Flare:

"Because Flare provides a command line compiler that can handle right-to-left languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, "

Can anyone offer more insight on this? Why is the command line compiler able to handle these languages and does that have any effect on online and PDF deliverables? I'm not currently using Flare so I don't have any experience with the command line compiler.

Are there any Flare gurus on here who can offer some help with this? I just attended a Madcap Road Show and the product evangelist told me some Flare trainers have found ways to get around the R-L limitation.

[Madcap Guru]

Flares editor does do Hebrew or other left to right languages. But the command line can generate the help. You would need to create the content in word and or FrameMaker And then impot it into flare and generate your help.

So word or FrameMaker will be where you create your topics. I hope that helps


Rick

[JustinKelley]

Hi Rick,

Is it really necessary to add topics to Word or FrameMaker and then import them into Flare? What I did is import an existing RoboHelp project into Flare. I found that by manually editing the Default.htm output file, I could produce a R-L look to the webhelp output. I reversed the order of the frame tags, so that the topic frame appeared on the left, and the navigation pane appeared on the right:

<frame name="body" title="Topic" frameborder="1" src="Skin/Blank.htm" />
<frame name="navigation" title="Navigation" src="Skin/Navigation.htm" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" onresize="frames['navigation'].SetIFrameHeight();" />

I also changed some of the output skin files to make them R-L. I attached the results of my test.

My results with the PDF generation weren't as successful.

[Madcap Guru]

That would work, I am not sure about creating a PDF, Since the print engine wasn't designed for that, you could try moving it out to word, and them have it left justified, and create a pdf that way.