RH Word to RH HTML "conversion"

[maniac9999]

Hi everyone,

Here's the situation. We have two VERY large CHM projects created and maintained in RH for Word - 534 Word docs, 2974 topics in each project. We've been told that the application the help is supporting will "go away" in a few years, but we all know what THAT means (never). I looked at the pre-release of RH 7 and got a sense that RH for Word might not be supported in the near future. I remember being asked on a survey as part of the pre-release a question like either "Into what format do you plan on converting your RH for Word projects?" or "When do you plan on converting your RH for Word projects into RHTML?" with the assumption that all users would be doing this. This gave me the impression that RH for Word might be around for RH 7, but maybe not for RH 8 or RH 9.

So, I've been analyzing and trying to determine what the best method would be for "converting" this project into RH HTML, just so that we're ready in case things don't go so well when we get RH 7 (we currently have RH X5 5.02) and experience problems.

It's been a very manual process so far - I've printed out the detailed TOC report from the RH Word project, and made sure that I've added the Map ID for each topic back in to the new RH HTML project, since the Import Map ID function in RH HTML doesn't seem to be built for importing map files from a RH Word project (I didn't expect it to be). For each topic, I've copied the content from the source Word file in the RH Word project into a blank Word doc, removed all formatting, then copied it into a new topic in the RH HTML project.

Does anyone have any other advice (other than "Good luck!")? Is this even worth doing as a backup plan? Does RH 7 have any utilities that might make this worthwhile?

Thanks,
Jim

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi Jim.
For a start, take a look at this article on Peter Grainge's site. It outlines some of the issues and suggested methods. You are bound to have some element of manual jiggery pokery if you decide to go down this line. That said, Adobe have not announced plans to drop support for RH for Word and even if they did, you could still use RH7 for a long time yet. Maybe you'd want to look at the Technical Communication Suite. You'd have to convert your Word docs to FrameMaker docs but it may prove less troublesome.

Just a thought!

[Guest]

Hi Jim,

Don't know how useful my question is now, given that you posted over a year ago.

Do your RH X5 Word source docs use styles?  If so, take a look here, and I detail how I have been able to import from RH X5 for Word to RH 7 HTML.  (I'm currently still working on a leftover issue with Keywords and Subkeywords.)

One thing I have done which probably helped:  while applying new standards to our documentation, we have removed almost all images (screen shots, etc.), and have only retained those images which don't have a text equivalent.  The drastically reduced the import file size of my Word source docs.  All my images were referenced via TrueCode, but upon importing to RH 7 HTML, there was so much less to be processed by RH 7 HTML, that the import went much more easily and quickly.

I hope this helps,
Marjorie