Converting CHM to Side Nav

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ChoccieMuffin
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Converting CHM to Side Nav

Post by ChoccieMuffin »

Afternoon all.

I have a ton of projects that I'm looking at converting from CHM and PDF output to HTML5 output. In order to not frighten our users too much with how our helps are laid out (and so I don't have a far too massive job re-jigging TOCs) I was thinking of going for the SideNav version of HTML5.

Does this approach seem sensible?
I have found a SideNav tutorial, but it assumes the starting point is top nav. I have also found a top nav tutorial (they're at https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare20 ... orials.htm in case anyone else is looking for them.) Do I need to convert my projects to TopNav and then to SideNav, or can I sensibly go straight from CHM to SideNav without crying too loudly?
Do any of you have any helpful tips or pointers? Some of my projects are absolutely huge and there's about 100 of them, so I want to do this in the most efficient way possible.

Fingers crossed you'll have some useful advice.
Started as a newbie with Flare 6.1, now using Flare 2023.
Report bugs at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx.
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wclass
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Location: Melbourne, Australia

Re: Converting CHM to Side Nav

Post by wclass »

Go straight! No Crying!

We have old projects that still need a CHM created, but we have updated our main styles to be side nav.

We created a new project and set up the new skins, mainly for our new projects. We also updated the style sheet and master pages in the process. There are new css style settings that you have to make to get top and/or side nav working. We created a separate project as we want to update the dozens of apps, and needed to create a template - you could just create a new skin if you like. I think it helps with testing as well.
Then we imported these skins and styles into our old project, created a new target, so now we can build with either the new nav target, or the old CHM. We created new targets, but could re-use the old TOCs for side-nav. However, for top-nav, we usually create a separate TOC.
We have kept the style sheets separate for now (renamed our old one "legacy-styles") so that we can produce either output without any problem.
As we don't create much PDF direct from Flare, I can't say but I wouldn't expect any problems.

Hope this helps.
Margaret Hassall - Melbourne
ChoccieMuffin
Senior Propellus Maximus
Posts: 2630
Joined: Wed Apr 14, 2010 8:01 am
Location: Surrey, UK

Re: Converting CHM to Side Nav

Post by ChoccieMuffin »

Thanks Margaret, I'll give it a go (once I've finally got the current release out of the door).
Started as a newbie with Flare 6.1, now using Flare 2023.
Report bugs at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx.
Request features at https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback ... quest.aspx
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