Version Control

[Guest]

I have RoboHelp HTML Version 7. We use RoboHelp for publishing our procedures; we use our Word documents for making reviews, updates, etc. and then just reimport and republish as necessary. Our company is asking us to use version control on our procedures. Since we cannot use the version control in RoboHelp, does anyone know of a version control app that can be used where we can import our docs from that app into RoboHelp? Version 7 only allows importing of Word, PDF, and HTML docs from folders on our computers or shared drives. I'm not sure if Version 8 has additional features.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Why can't you use RH's version control? You don't say...

It sounds more like you want to control the docs that you use that get imported into an RH project - what about something like Tortoise SVN?

[Guest]

Our group essentially edits the procedures and publishes. We use the Word documents for the hundreds of team members that make the actual updates (the subject matter experts). Since they do not have access to RH, we use the Word docs for them to update and then republish in RH.

Is there a way to export a document from RH into Word other than the "Edit with Microsoft 2007" option? Our partners are so used to our Word template, that if we use the Edit With option it dramatically changes the appearance of the document (and it's not an Word document). Our template is so clean. (I've attached samples)

The first sample is our template in Word. The second sample is a document taken from RoboHelp using the "Edit with Microsoft 2007" option. There's a big difference; one is a Word doc the other an HTML doc. We’ve only recently been able to get these team members to use the correct template.

I will check out the Tortoise SVN.

I appreciate your response.

[Captiv8r]

Hi Karen

Attaching will not work. If you want to supply samples, you will need to make them available some other way such as Acrobat.com or YouSendIt.com.

Cheers... Rick

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[Jeff_Coatsworth]

So it sounds like your workflow is: single-source author in Word docs (fitting whatever template you've standardized on); then make edits to the Word docs; then import into RH project; then publish to whatever help output format. Why would you need to go back from RH to Word? It's a one-way street in this workflow.

That sort of workflow only requires something that prevents 2 authors trying to work on the same Word doc at the same time, right? Also, given a fancy enough folder structure, you could maintain multiple versions (copies) of the same docs for different versions of documentation. But this sort of workflow calls out for some sort of content management system so that you don't end up having content out of synch in the various copies of the same doc, not a version control system (check in/check out).

[Guest]

You are correct. After further research and talking with other technical writers (who do not use RoboHelp), it looks like our only option at this point is to manually keep the old versions. I was trying to find something that was more automated, but since we are limited on where we can import from (i.e., I can import Word doc from shared drive but not from sharepoint), we will have to go this route until I find something more suitable.

Thank you for the information and helping me to clarify some things. There aren’t many users of RH here at my work, so it's great to have this forum to go to for answers.