Creating Topics in Robohelp from a Frame document

I’m currently relearning the joys of RoboHelp after a few years and a few versions of unfamiliarity and I hit a snag on trying to convert documents into topics. I’m using Framemaker 10 and RoboHelp 9 (as part of the Adobe Technical Communication Suite 3.5).

I had written the Online Help topics in Frame 10 using Headings 1 to 4 to provide some structure. Once the content got through the First Draft of approval feedback, I wanted to convert that Frame document to Robohelp.

What I wanted the conversion to do is to create individual topic files based on the heading level instead of each document being one big topic file with multiple heading sections. But when I tried to convert the Frame document to Robohelp, it created one big topic per Frame file.

After padding through the Adobe support forums a bit, I found the answer.

• RoboHelp 9: When importing a Frame document into RoboHelp (File > Import > FrameMaker document), you click Next on the first dialog box, then click Edit.
• RoboHelp 11: Select the Project tab, look to the Link panel, and click Settings. In the Import tab, click Edit conversion settings (for Frame or Word).

Open the Paragraph tree, select each applicable Heading level style, and click the Pagination checkbox. This will create a topic every time it encounters the style you specify (in my case, Headings 1 to 4).

If you have a cover page per chapter, you may want to select the Paragraph styles on that cover page and select Exclude from output. I often find that the cover pages in a book have no relevancy in Online Help.