Importing Word Documents with Images

[UPG123]

Hi, When I import word document in to Robohelp, it imports the images also. Now, I have duplicate images in multiple topics. How do I avoid duplicate images being imported? Is there anyway, where I can collate and store all the images in a single folder, instead of saving it in multiple folders?

[Peter Grainge]

Welcome to the forum

I think I understand what you mean.

When you import document one, it has an image called Screen1. When you import the next document, it has the same image so you don't want it imported. Is that the case? If not then we need some clarification.

If that is the problem, the import routine has no way of knowing that two different images are the same. Having the same name would not help as a I could create an image of a man and an image of a woman, then give the file name man.jpg to both. Filename is the same, image is not.

[UPG123]

Yes.. That is my problem. When I have 10 word documents to import, and all 10 documents have some images in common, my project stores duplicate images. I want to avoid this. Is there any work around?

[Peter Grainge]

That's the beauty of creating the content in RH, you don't get that problem.

When importing, there is no way I know of avoiding that problem precisely because RH has no way of knowing the image is the same.

[markpud]

My simple solution is after import, go into the Design view and manually replace the image with the one you already have in the project... Ugly but it's the only way that works!

[Kevin_Elmore]

Another possible solution is to replace your images in the Word documents with the path to the image. Or some other tracking feature that you can then update later.

I never did get this off the ground, but I had an idea to handle the fact that our documents tend to have one or more warning or information icons. Within Word, I have an AutoText that inserts [msg_warn] or [msg_info]. When the Word documents are imported into RoboHelp, then I would run a global search and replace [msg_warn] with the path to the warning icon.

If you can be organized enough to pull that off, it may work out. Unfortunately, things didn't work that way for my projects, but it was a nice thought.

Kevin

[markpud]

Nice idea... I too have a Warning and Note icon repeated on almost every page.. but I don't find it too much bother to paste over the top with the "proper" icon after importing 🙂

[Kevin_Elmore]

quote:

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Originally posted by: markpud
Nice idea... I too have a Warning and Note icon repeated on almost every page.. but I don't find it too much bother to paste over the top with the "proper" icon after importing :)

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You're right. One reason this plan never came to fruition is because this doesn't take a lot of time.

When I first came aboard, I envisioned a lot of importing of Word documents where each change was done to a Word doc (complete with macros and useful AutoText) and then imported into RoboHelp. Then, a global search would take care of the image problem. But that isn't really our MO, so this never happened.

Although, it's a great way to create a new project. Author your Word documents with meaningful characters to represent each icon. Then when you import everything, just include the graphic once and then do a global search.

Kevin