MadCap Software Forums

I have a single HTML file that I have imported into Flare. Now I need to create smaller topics from that single file and maintain the existing links between the new topics. Does anyone know how this can be done in Flare?

I don't know of an automatic way to do this after import, and you can't do it upon import of HTML. You can't select to split the topic using styles as you can with say a Word import.

Depending on the size of the file my choices would be:

• If the single file isn't too large and having it in a single file doesn't matter to you or your users (say you were outputting as PDF), leave it as it is. Flare doesn't care if it's all a single file or not. If outputting to online help, the topic would be long and difficult to read/bookmark/navigate.
• If the file isn't too large, copy/paste content into new topics, then drag/drop those topics into a TOC structure. You'd need to add or update any additional cross references between the topics. I like the cleanness of this approach and even on quite long documents I still copy/paste into clean files. I'm a control freak...
• If the file is large and contains many subsections identified using levels of h1/h2/h3/h4 etc, open the HTML in Word, save as a Word file and then import that into Flare. Word will automatically apply Heading 1/Heading 2/etc styles for h1/h2/etc. Seems like a roundabout way of doing it, but at least then on import you can automatically split the file into separate topics using heading styles. In the Optional section of Word import choose to associate your existing CSS, Discard MS Word Styles, and Start new topics on the headings you specify.

Hope that helps,
Rob

Thanks for the reply Rob. The file is a large file, 280 pages in the original FrameMaker format. There are many links throughout the file, so it's very important that those links remain functional between the topics after the file is split into multiple html files. Does cutting and pasting retain the functionality of those links? If not, would your Word option do this?

The major problem we are trying to solve is migrating multiple large FrameMaker book files into Flare, then being able to output both to html and pdf. We tried the FrameMaker import option, but the links are not functional when we create a pdf from the imported html files. I posted some questions to the forum a couple months ago about this problem but received no responses. So I found that when I save a book file to html in FrameMaker, then import that html file into Flare, the links in both the html file and within an output pdf file all work. The problem is, as I've stated, that we need multiple topics for our html output, and we need the pdf file to be split into two separate pdf files, with the links all working between them.

Try the Kaizen plugin by Mattias Sander.

The Kaizen plugin is free; you just need to sign up here: https://www.improvementsoft.com/Content ... kaizen.htm

Thanks. Do you think your plugin has the functionality that I need. That is, when I use the feature to split topics, will the cross references still work?