Pam, The basic Web Works that shipped with Frame 7.2 may work for you *if* you have all of the conversion templates from ePublisher and you don't modify anything in the template that will break the conversion rules. It's basically a compiler. The idea was you need one license of Pro to build and maintain your conversion templates, then you distribute those templates to other writers. They could use the pre-defined templates with the standard WebWorks option to generate help.
As for other conversion tools, there are several out there: Robohelp, MifToGo, Madcap Flare. We currently are using MadCap Flare 5.something and it works, but it's been a little painful getting everything to work correctly. The graphic conversion settings are counter intuitive. If you select the option to not convert the graphics, which is usually what you do when you want to preserve the quality, the graphics come out smooshed. Instead, you have to tell it to convert and then you set up a PDF job options with super high quality graphic rendering parameters and have it use those job options. There's also a known issue in which Flare doesn't like non-breaking characters, so we have to import templates before the online help build to replace all variables and x-ref formats with versions that do not contain non-breaking characters. It's kind of a pain and their tech support didn't seem to understand the problem or the work around, but they told me they opened an issue for it. The forums seem to know more about the product than the tech support department. I'm thinking about using FrameScript to automate this preparation task. I've heard good things about Mif2Go and Robohelp. Thanks, Jess ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:38:59 -0400 From: Pam Reichert <pam.reich...@vpisystems.com> To: framers at lists.frameusers.com Subject: Help Tools Message-ID: <f5d54d495e100c8a07574fe0444bbb40 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 I have been using WebWorks epublisher Pro version 9.2 to convert our FrameMaker documents into online help for our applications. Recently my laptop started having problems and they are moving me to a new laptop. The writer who installed epublisher on my laptop is no longer with the company and we can?t find the CD with a serial number. I noticed a version of WebWorks comes on the FrameMaker 7.2 CD but it is called WebWorks Standard. I thought maybe this is where the WebWorks came from. Is WebWorks Standard the same as ePublisher pro? Even if it is, no serial number I find on any of our CDs seems to work with it and Adobe can?t seem to help me. When I go to the WebWorks page I can?t get help there either because I don?t have a maintenance contract. I don?t think WebWorks actually *wants* customers. When I try to find out how much it costs to buy a new copy, no prices are listed unless you have a sales person call you. We don?t have phones in our office. I am pretty fed up with it all and am thinking of moving the help to a new platform. Can you suggest another help platform that works well with FrameMaker files and looks similar to ePublisher? I need to produce online help in both .chm files and html files. Pam Reichert ------------------------------