Graphic-Based Navigation?

[odyssey]

Hi all - I'm investigating potential tools to use to build/reinforce my company's best practices and methodologies, and have focused my search primarily on Flare (seems like they've put a lot of thought into workflow enhancement) Robohelp (because I'm familiar with other Adobe products) and Eclipse Process Framework (because the price is right -free).

By the time I've drilled down to the most detailed level, our methodology will have a lot of text - tasks, checklists, instructions, and so on. But at the higher levels, I want to have the navigation based around graphics, some process flows, sometimes other graphics pulled in from other programs.

The sites that I've seen in the "Flare In Action" threads are all (as far as I could determine) text-based, in terms of how the navigation works. Does anyone know of a more graphic-rich environment that I could take a look at? Is it possible to do things like conditional links (or different links based on different user profiles) from the hot spots on a common graphic?


Thanks for the help!

Darryl

[SteveS]

Hi Darryl,

Welcome to the forums.

Short answer is yes, you can create hot spot navigation in Flare and yes, you can have conditional tags on links.

I haven't tried conditional links on an image. You may have to create duplicate images for each of your conditions.

There may be a way to manually apply the conditional tags tp a hotspot mapping using a text editor as well, but I think I'd prefer to have multiple images - it will make it a lot easier to maintain the project.

HTH

[KevinDAmery]

You could do it as an image map (i.e. one image with hotspots defined in Flare) or you could use an image editing program to create slices that are placed into a table. Either method will work, although the first is easier.

[odyssey]

Thanks, guys - I am certainly more interested in managing the links in Flare, rather than using ImageReady or something to do that. If the conditional links are possible from within the hotspots, that puts me quite a ways ahead. Creating duplicate images would be a bit of a nightmare - I'd rather not have half a dozen copies of every one of my process maps to have to maintain...

[LTinker68]

I don't believe there's an option to apply a conditional tag to the image map hotspot at the time you create it, but after you create all your hotspots, then you can open the topic in the Internal Text Editor to make your changes. You should (theoretically) be able to add the MadCap conditional tag around the hyperlinks so that you have multiple hyperlinks for one hotspot, but the destination of the hotspot is determined by whichever conditional tag matches the output.

BTW, I want to make sure you understand something about conditional tags in Flare -- they aren't dynamic in the output. That is, you can't have the content in the output change depending on which user or profile is logged in. Conditional tags control what is built. You can still do what you want, just not as dynamically. Basically, you're going to have to create targets for each of your possible situations, create corresponding conditional tags, then apply the tags to anything whose content will be dependent on which target is built. You most likely will want to build the targets to the same server, but under different folders. If you then have a "normal" web page that you create where the user can log in or select a view or however your content is structured, then you can determine which folder and which help output that user goes to. It's more overhead in that you have to build multiple complete help outputs, but Flare does most of the heavy lifting for you, other than having to apply the appropriate conditional tags to the appropriate items.

[KevinDAmery]

Are you going to need to have different conditions available simultaneously? (i.e. within the same image do you need one link to be conditioned for A and a different link conditioned for B?) If not, the simple way to do it would be to add two (or three or five or whatever) copies of the image, each pointing to its own map links. Then you could use conditions on each of the images to show / hide the entire image map.

[odyssey]

That helps - thanks. My goal is to have, from a high-level methodology, the ability for users of different profiles to use the same image (a set of project phases, for example), to be able to drill down to the details of their own tasks and responsibilities for that phase.

If I understand correctly, that wouldn't be a problem: if I have an image with five hotspots on it, and each of those hotspots is conditional to allow for three different profiles to each go to their own view of the details, I would need to have those 15 linked pages all built and included in my Flare project, and there's not much more to it.

The conditions are not overly complex - it will be a full set of "A" links for one user, a full set of "B" links for another, and so on, so it should still be fairly linear from a creation and navigation point of view.

[SteveS]

... Creating duplicate images would be a bit of a nightmare - I'd rather not have half a dozen copies of every one of my process maps to have to maintain...

You won't have to create multiple images. You can insert the same inage twice and do the mapping in Flare afterwards.