Reverse Engineering Possible?

[Murfrider]

Is there a way to reverse engineer a complete robohelp project back into robohelp to make updates?

[maniac9999]

Murfrider,

Two questions: What output are you working with? and What version of RH?

If it's CHM, there's a great free tool called "KeyTools" at http://www.keyworks.net/ that I've used. Just point to the chm you want to decomile into HTML files, then tell it where you want to save the files. Easy and fast.

If it's WebHelp, well, I wouldn't recommend trying to "reverse engineer" it. Someone over here inadvertently imported an HTML file from a WebHelp output and they screwed up the project (we're still using RH X5). In this case, if you have no other choice, I would somehow try to clean up the HTML files (maybe use Dreamweaver) before you import them into a new RH project. I haven't gotten my hands on the production version of RH 7 yet - maybe they have better clean up tools. You could also view the files in IE/Firefox then copy the content into new RH topics, but that would be tedious also.

Either way you look at it, it won't be a "push a button and go" kind of thing, though that would be great, wouldn't it?

Maybe Peter or Rick will chime in to give better advice. If you have a choice of outputs to work from, I'd go for a CHM.

Jim

[Murfrider]

No luck on the CHM, it's all html. The project was done in RH5, I have RH6, not sure if that helps or hurts. Like you said it looks like I'd have to bring in the html one at a time, way too tedious.

[RoboWizard]

Hi Murfrider

You are probably going to be interested in the following links:
Link number one
Link number two

Cheers... Rick

[Murfrider]

Thanks Rick, I forwarded the link to the guy who really has to fix this problem, heehee. I may play with it a bit if I get a chance.