Creating RoboHelp index using existing printed index

[riggsdar1]

How do I take an index from an existing document and add it to my project so RoboHelp can search for those terms? I am converting a printed user guide to HTML help and the project is too large to create the index manually and doing it automatically takes just as much time since I have to go through and delete a quarter of the keywords selected. If I could import the current index so the index wizard searches for just those keywords and subkeywords, it would save me hours of work.

[Peter Grainge]

Isn't importing the index one of the options you see when you import the Word document?

[riggsdar1]

It was originally a Framemaker document that had been printed to PDF. Since I didn't have Framemaker at the time, I had to convert the document to Word, so the indexing function wasn't available for import.

[Peter Grainge]

Your question started "How do I take an index from an existing document..." from which I thought you meant a Word document.

Are you are saying that you did not have the Framemaker document, just the PDF or otherwise you would have converted the PDF to Framemaker? Sorry, can you make the history a bit clearer and perhaps more importantly let us know which type of document has the index that you want to import? Framemaker or Word and which files do you have?

[riggsdar1]

Okay, we purchased some software from a company selling off some of their products. For the documentation, they sent us the original Framemaker document (albeit for an older version of the software), an HTML help version, and a PDF version. Since I did not have Framemaker available, I converted the PDF version to Word then imported the Word version into RoboHelp. The PDF version had an index but when converted to Word, it did not convert into a useable index, i.e., no links, no ability to update. I now have the index in Word, as text only, and that is what I want to import.

[Peter Grainge]

When you say you have an HTML help version, do you mean a CHM file? If so, why not reverse engineer that into a RH project and you will have your index as well and HTML that hasn't been mangled by Word.

There's an article on my site about reverse engineering a CHM into a RH project. It's quick and easy.