Editing HTM files without recompiling in RoboHelp

[barbara_seddon]

Hi (and thanks for the responses I've received on other questions).

My users are requesting that once they have our application with my context-sensitive online help, they want to be able to go into some of the HTML source files in the Help and add URLs or links to servers so that they can provide links to their own organisation's documents.

However, they will not have RoboHelp. Whilst I know that you can indeed edit the HTML source files, I believe the changes are only displayed once you have recompiled the project in RoboHelp.

Do you know if there is any other way this new info can be displayed/accessible in the project without using RoboHelp to recompile it?

[RoboColum_n_]

Your webhelp output (I assume this is what you are producing) is in fact just a collection of HTM files so there is nothing to stop them from manually editing them. However the content will not be indexed in the search. Perhaps more worrying is content that is returned by a search may not be actually available. The only way to get around this is to recompile which would need a RH licence.

[Willam_van_Weelden · Accepted solution]

Hi,

A method some of my colleages use is as follows: Add a blank topic in the TOC with the name of the customer. On first delivery (the WebHelp runs on a webserver of the client), the empty topic is delivered with the output. With every new iteration of the help, this blank file is left out of the help output. (My collegue manually deletes the file after generation.) This way this file is never overwritten. The client adds links, text, etc in these topics in the output. The downside: The topic is not indexed and I don't believe the search picks up the topics content. But it made a few clients happy...

Greet,

Willam

[barbara_seddon]

I have just tried this out and it works fine! This is great. Thanks so much. I'm sure our customers will be happy now.

[Peter Grainge]

I think this may be closer to what you originally specified but it is also more work and not so straightforward. Your customer can add a link to any topic by completing a javascript file.

http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/customising/editable_links.htm

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@petergrainge