lost capability?

[Guest]

am i going blind or did robohelp lose the option to make a copy of the built hlp file to a different directory somewhere between 2002 and x5??

[RoboColum_n_]

I don't want to tell you to eat a bag of carrotts just yet as it has been awhile since I've used winhelp. That said I'm 99% sure that function was in RHX3. It may have been lost in X5 though.

[Captiv8r]

Good morning, gentlemen

I'm guessing X3 would have made that function perform a disappearing act. This is the version that introduced the new "Single Source Layouts". With this new feature, the intent of the developers was to use the new "Batch Generate" feature. (I'm stretching a bit her and making an assumption that RoboHelp for Word (which is used to produce .HLP files) is similar to RoboHelp HTML and has this feature among its feature set. I haven't developed .HLP for eons)

Cheers... Rick

[Guest]

is there something in the single source setup that does a similar function?? my machine is downloading the latest update... only 15 minutes left for my poor isdn line, so i can't look right now. I just hate to have to either redirect the app to look where rh builds to, or to manually have to copy the hlp out to where the app expects it every time. and i don't care for hlp projects but unfortunately this is an update to an old app and i don't want to change it all to html help right now, maybe next year if they pay me more i can do that conversion.

[Captiv8r · Accepted solution]

Hi dave.r and I suppose I should also say: welcome to our community. Sorry I forgot that.

Wow, I actually fired up my copy of RoboHelp for Word to check this!

Okay, note that at the bottom of your RoboHelp application, you see a folder labeled "Single Source Layouts". If you right click a layout, you have the option to duplicate it. So to copy the output file to multiple locations, you now have multiple copies of the layout. In the properties of each of the layouts, you specify different folders and file names.

Now comes the fun part. You click File > Batch Generate... and just place check marks next to the desired layouts. Once you select all the layouts you want, you click the Generate button and off you go.

There is one thing I'm not totally sure about with this. If you are generating multiple copies of the same layout, but just to different folders, I'm thinking you end up actually compiling the .HLP two or more times, whereas in the former paradigm it was more efficient, as you simply compiled a single time and copied to the desired folders.

Now if you really want to, you should be able to accomplish the compile once copy many by simply creating your own batch file to do the heavy lifting of the copying.

Cheers... Rick 🙂