HTML5 Woes -- Even Support can't help

[mlezak]

Hi all -- I'm in a panic, and maybe, just maybe someone has a clue (MadCap support does not).

I had a WebHelp project that pretty much worked. For a number of reasons, I did a whole bunch of stuff to it including:

* Splitting it into two projects -- MAIN and SUB. The SUB project will be updated more frequently than MAIN and is linked in via runtime merging.
* Updating it to an HTML5 target (rather than WebHelp)
* Attempting to create a whole bunch of working links between MAIN and SUB.

What I've found:

After working with Support, I'm now building and publishing the SUB project and then copying it into the MAIN /Subsystems folder. That seems to work for the Flare support folks, but I've found that I have to then publish the entire MAIN project to get the MAIN TOC.

In addition, I have found that:
* My SUB topics are coming up as not part of the project (How do I know? They have a navigation link at the top).
* All of the dropdowns in the SUB topics are nailed open (and just how weird is that?). If I open the project by itself, the dropdowns work fine -- it's only when they have been sucked into the MAIN project.
* Video links don't work at all.
* And I still haven't figured out the proper incantation to get the links between these project to work. When I build either project, I get a bunch of Link points outside project file errors -- but I've been assuming those are more warnings (indeed, these links ARE pointing outside the project file!).

This whole process is driving me crazy -- I need to be able to have this project ready for production in three weeks (and I'm on vacation next week).

If anyone has any brilliant ideas -- I'd love to hear 'em -- I'd be more than happy to share these projects if you think you have a clue.

Here's what things look like right now (always subject to change):

http://www.scribesoft.com/helpcenter/staging/online/en/

Thanks very much! As I mentioned above, I will be gone next week, but my co-worker will be monitoring the forum.

Miriam

[mlezak]

For other folks -- I think I managed to fix the issues with the broken SUB topics by changing "Open in browser frame" option from _self to _top In the Advanced Properties tab of the Merged TOC file.

I still can't get links across projects to work, but that's a whole different topic.

For the video links, I've been trying, with mixed success, to get Vimeo and Flare to play nice. I'll have to worry about that later.

Flare support has, in general, been great -- I want to thank them for their persistence (especially, this time around, Eric).

[HeraTech]

Miriam,

At my last job I had a rather complex system with a Master project and 40 or 50 child projects. And I had trouble with my cross-project links too. I finally figured out that unless I wanted to hard code them, links can only go one way. Relative links only work from parent to child, or from child to parent. That is, it's a one way street, no U-turns. If you want to link from a child project to a child project you HAVE to hard code the links.

(ETA - This means that anything that you want to link to in the Master project cannot be inside a folder. So, for example, if your videos are in the master project, they have to be at the top level, you can't hide them in a folder called "Videos" because then your relative link path is from the child up to the parent and then you're trying to make a U-turn and go back down the path into the videos folder.)

I did finally figure out the trick for hard coding links between children. I fully documented it for myself, but it's in my backup files at home. I'll see if I can dig it out for you.

Say "Hi" to the gang for me. *waves*

Julie Stickler

[HeraTech]

I pulled out my archive files last night, and this was for a WebHelp project, but since we're talking links, it should still be relevant. I originally found my answer here (giving credit where credit is due) http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... 13&t=14371. Although I haven't tried merged projects on an HTML5 project, so test it first.

I had to play around to get the right number of "../" in the paths so that everything worked. And as I noted in my previous comment, I had to move some common topics in my Master project up to the root level because you can't move up the path and then back down (no U-turns, relative links are a one-way street).

I didn't end up having any notes about how I did the hard coded links, but as I recall, the trick was that you have to hard code to where the topic is GOING TO BE (i.e when it is published in live Help in your product), not where the topic lives in either your source or your output folder. So you do not want to link your topic to you local output, for example, C:\Output_Files\WidgetPro\Output\HTML5\Topic.htm.

Instead you want to edit the link to what the URL of the actual published topic looks like:

Either on your hosted Website:http://doc.widgetmaster.com/widgetpro/e ... /topic.htm

or from the product itself:http://widgetpro/doc/application/folder/topic.htm

Which means that you can't see your links working on your local system, you have to test in either a test environment or on a staging server. When I was building my hard coded links I would go to the (existing) published files and copy and paste the URLs, editing as needed if I was copying from my staging server. I also seem to recall that I did get warnings or errors about external links when I generated the project.

Also, what browsers are you testing on? Chrome 30 broke something (I can't recall what) that was causing problems for our product that required UI fixes to render correctly. And yesterday I found out that [competing product name redacted] had released a patch to make their WebHelp output work on Chrome and IE11. Just so you know, it might not be you, it might be a browser issue.

[mlezak]

Thanks Heratech -- Useful information all around! I ended up having to bail and go back to WebHelp, but I think this is still vital information!

[Psider]

We are using links between child systems in HTML5 output.

For example, if our production (published) structure looks like so (hope the spacing translates okay):

Code: Select all

ParentHelp
    SubSystems
        FirstChild
            FCFolder1
                FCTopic1.htm
        SecondChild
            SCFolder1
                SCTopic1.htm

To create a link in SCTopic1, we need to put in enough ../ to "go back" to the SubSystems folder, then the path "down" to the FCTopic1. In this case, we need one ../ to get back to "SecondChild" and a second ../ to get back to "SubSystems". Then we just follow the path FirstChild/FCFolder1/FCTopic1.htm

href="../../FirstChild/FCFolder1/FCTopic1.htm"

Hope that makes sense.