RH copies project-external images into output -- how to stop this?

[Guest]

Hi everyone, and thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

One of our projects has four WebHelp output folders. Each one contains subfolders for images, videos, and pdfs -- resources referenced within the topics.

Our client has asked us to centralize these resources into a single folder so that these files -- especially large ones like videos -- don't need to have multiple redundant copies hosted on their servers.  So the top level folder structure that we deliver to the client should be:

output1

output2

output3

output4

resources

|

|---images

|---pdfs

|---videos

In the source, I now reference these types of files using "../../resources/videos/<filename>".  This relative path points to a folder outside the main RH project folder ("resources" is a sibling of the project folder).

In the case of videos and pdfs, everything works as expected. The videos and pdfs aren't copied into the output folder.

But RoboHelp continues to copy all images into the output folder...into the *parent* output folder, not an "images" subfolder below it.

Is there a way to prevent RH from doing this?  I am using RoboHelp 10.

Thank you!

--David DeBoe

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

And you’re making the same referenced path to the images as you are to the videos?

[Guest]

Yes.  In every place where a topic references an image, I've changed the img code to point to "../../resources/images/<filename>".

Thanks for your attention and quick reply!

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

How did you change it? Just by editing the HTML in the project or by re-browsing the path?

[Guest]

By editing the HTML.  But your question prompted me to go back and do an experiment.

And I found that when I use the Insert Image button to browse to and select an image in the external "resources/images" folder, RH immediately makes a copy of the image in the main project folder!

Now I'm thinking that this behavior might be by design -- a feature not a bug.  But if anyone knows of a way to outsmart RH and get it to accept references to external images, I'd love to hear it.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

What happens if you try adding a hyperlink to the image instead of doing an Insert? Or, could you edit the output HTML to see if it works when you delete the image in the output’s root folder?

[Guest]

I think I may have uncovered the problem.

To ensure that images were pulled only from the images folder outside the project, I had initially renamed the internal images folder to images_old.  Then RH insisted that it had to have an images folder, and created a new, empty one.  Fine, no problem.

After I convinced myself there was no workaround, I deleted the empty images folder and restored the original one by renaming it back to "images".  And suddenly the image references to ../../resources/images began to be preserved in my builds.  Topics in the output were following the relative path to the external images folder, as I intended.

Counterintuitively, it appears that RH is happy to let me link to images in folders outside the project...as long as it also has those images in its internal images folder...?  That will create some hassle when images need to be updated, but at least it's working now.

Jeff, thanks again for your help.

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

Perhaps this ancient article I wrote will help you to better understand the RoboHelp "Images" folder.

(hint - It's not really a folder)

Click here to view

Cheers... Rick

[Guest]

Thanks Rick.  Your article made sense.  I'll be more chary in my dealings with the images folder in the future.