H&M to Salesforce

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Technical Tom
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Joined: Thu Mar 24, 2022 2:40 pm

H&M to Salesforce

Unread post by Technical Tom »

I am producing a user guide that will be generated in two formats: PDF and online help published via Salesforce Knowledge.

Salesforce articles are based on html, but with these limitations:
  • there is no means of associating a CSS,
  • it is not possible to produce a valid article with the CSS squeezed into a <head> at the top of the Salesforce html.
This means that the any paragraph and character styles created in H&M (which H&M places in a CSS) are lost in the Salesforce articles!

I am prepared for a degree of simplification, but need to find some semi-automated way of reproducing the paragraph and character styles created in H&M.

Any ideas for tackling this challege, which is not the fault of H&M, will be welcome.

xxx
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Tim Green
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Re: H&M to Salesforce

Unread post by Tim Green »

there is no means of associating a CSS,
it is not possible to produce a valid article with the CSS squeezed into a <head> at the top of the Salesforce html.
Well, they're forbidding you to use the only two standard ways that you can format HTML content. :D

If you really want to use the HTML topic files generated by Help+Manual your only option would be to do ALL the formatting manually. Every paragraph should be formatted with Normal and ANY other formatting should be applied manually, by selecting the text and formatting with the Font and Paragraph dialogs. You will have to do this for every single paragraph and piece of text in your entire project.

The only alternative to that would be to not put the HM-generated content into Salesforce. Instead, generate a proper WebHelp output folder, put that online where you want to host it and link to it from your Salesforce pages.

If they won't even let you link to the WebHelp pages, then basically you can't use Help+Manual output because it means that Salesforce is locking out anything that is not created by them. Then you'll have to generate all the content directly in whatever editor/interface they provide.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
Technical Tom
Posts: 11
Joined: Thu Mar 24, 2022 2:40 pm

Re: H&M to Salesforce

Unread post by Technical Tom »

Once again Tim, thank you for your personalised reply and genuine attempt to help.
Technical Tom
Posts: 11
Joined: Thu Mar 24, 2022 2:40 pm

Re: H&M to Salesforce

Unread post by Technical Tom »

One possibility to make the transfer a little easier would be to replace any HTML tags referring to styles defined in a separate CSS by 'hard-coded' tags specifying the style.

For example,

Code: Select all

<span class="Interface">Adjust opacity</span>
would be replaced by

Code: Select all

<span style="font-size:0.75rem;color:#ffffff; background-color:#626262;">Adjust opacity</span>
My colleague has pointed to the tickbox Configuration - Publishing Options - Webhelp - HTML Export Options - Export Style Names. However, this seems to have only changed the original example to:

Code: Select all

<span class="fnt13">Adjust opacity</span>
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Tim Green
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Re: H&M to Salesforce

Unread post by Tim Green »

Tom, what you are asking for here is for Help+Manual to have a function designed to undo the disciplined styles formatting of the project and eliminate the ability to format the project globally, which isn't going to happen. If you want the formatting to be inline as you describe, you are going to have to remove the styles from every single piece of formatted text in your project.

You need to do that interactively, because Help+Manual needs to read the style and insert the inline formatting for every XML tag. However, you CAN do this for entire topics: Select the entire topic with CTRL+A when the cursor is anywhere in the topic outside a table, then open the style selector dropdown and click on the "Remove Style" entry right at the top. This will remove all the styles and replace them with inline formatting. You will then need to repeat this for every topic.

Be warned that this is a really terrible idea, so you will probably want to keep a backup of the undamaged project before you do this. Once you have done it, you will no longer be able to apply any global formatting by editing styles. Your XML code will also be massively bloated and you can no longer use it for translation and localization, as translation tools like Trados will gag on it. Also, any text added after this must also be processed in the same way.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
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