Hi All:
Regarding Tyler's comments that basically address most of my
issues, (You GO Tyler!!), I have the following comments to add to
the "I hope they add these" features list.
1 - General word imports -- being forced to change all the
bullets and numbers to correct "bullets" and "numbers" is a bit
frustrating
<<< Even with Peter's solution, it is still, IMHO,
FAR from seamless to import a Word 2003 doc and have it convert to
HTML properly, including bulleted and numbered styles.
I've finally worked out a method using RoboHelp WinHelp to
convert all my Word documents (some as much as 50 pages long), but
it is still labor-intensive! (And I have tried converters, I've
tried importing from Word straight, from a PDF, and so on, and that
took even more time.) Right now, to convert from Word to HTML, I
open the document in Word, apply a "conversion template," that I
developed. Then, I open the Style chooser in Word and overwrite all
the styles in the Word document with the "conversion template"
styles. (This template makes bullet and number styles without a
bullet or number, as well as some other changes to match my CSS
styles in RoboHelp.) I convert all the headings and them compile
the processed document in WinHelp. If that works and there are no
corrupted tables (my docs are Infomapped), then I generate
single-source output to HTML. *Then* I import the HTML doc into the
WebHelp project.
I would like the RoboHelp team to look at providing a "clean"
method to convert Word docs to HTML or even XML that would keep
some formatting (like bulleted styles, tables, and so on), but not
port over all the embedded styles and classes in the Word doc that
make applying a CSS a pain! A REAL Word-to-RoboHelp built-in filter
would be absolutely WONDERFUL. I'd upgrade just for that feature,
no kidding.
2 - Better Merged Project support - The ability to link to
and and from merged projects would be STELLAR... currently you need
to use ../../../../ etc.etc.etc it's rediculous, and you never know
if you got it wrong until there's a 404.
<<<< I've used Peter's instructions for Merged
WebHelp and it works great, but it's still a pain to copy and paste
the URL (or type it) for thousands of files. Yuck. It took days and
days to do that in my current project, which has about 10K topics
total.
I would really really like a more automatic method to do
this, like how I can drag and drop a link in a "regular" non-merged
help. Or some feature like being able to browse to the location,
maybe for a group of files? I never want to spend a whole week
cutting and pasting links again!
4 - Better Table support. Copying rows, columns & cells,
currently unsupported. You can copy a full table, but not
rows/columns or cells.... Also I'd like to see more word-esque
table support, i.e. "Insert column to the right/left", "Insert rows
above/below"
<<<No kidding. This would be great great great. How
about supporting embedded tables a little better too, particularly
when converting over from Word? Again, working with Infomapped
documents that have embedded tables requires me to disassemble the
embedded table, insert a new table, and then retype (or cut and
paste) all the text. Ugh.
Just my two cents. Peter's input has been invaluable (thanks
Peter) to work around some of these issues--I couldn't have done it
without his help at grainge.org. BUT, I would still like to see an
update to RoboHelp address some of these issues. I think that
merged WebHelp and converting from Microsoft Word will not go away
anytime soon, so it would make my life ever so much easier if they
would address these issues.
Diana