How to upgrade my projects to RoboHelp 8

[Guest]

I am completely at a loss as to how to proceed to upgrade my RoboHelp 7 projects to RoboHelp 8.

Apparently the bullet styles in Robohelp 7 will no longer work correctly in RoboHelp 8.

I was trying to create a new stylesheet, but creating an entirely new stylesheet and then having to go through and reapply the styles, sentence by sentence, is not feasible.

I notice that in the Styles and Formatting pane, I now have some styles identified by the paragraph icon and another group of styles identified by the "bulleted list" icon. The bulleted list ones all begin with P and the rest of the name is identical to a paragraph style. Noticed that If I apply a P-bullet style to new text, it looks like it ought to work. Should I then delete all the "Bullet" paragraph styles, leaving their "P-bullet" list styles, and re-apply just the "P-bullet" versions to the list sentences in my topics?

I'm puzzled about how to get the XML cleaned our & remove the remains of RoboHelp 7 styles without having to find & replace everything directly in the HTML.

Should I create a new stylesheet and stich each sentence to it or try to clean up the existing stylesheet, and if the latter, how?

Thanks,

John

[Peter Grainge]

I recently looked at an X5 project and the code looked like this.

<li class="p-ListBullet"><p class="ListBullet" >

I have also seen it written as  <li><p class="ListBullet" > in other versions.

Lists should be created through the LI tag, not the P tag. The old way was OK until RH8 introduced XHTML which is stricter.

Amending either of the above to <li class="p-ListBullet"><p > should fix it.

The corresponding styles in the CSS would be something likeP.Bulleted-List {    list-style: disc;    margin-left: -6pt;}LI.P-Bulleted-List {    list-style: disc;}The P class should either be removed or commented out as below./* P.Bulleted-List {    list-style: disc;    margin-left: -6pt;} */LI.P-Bulleted-List {    list-style: disc;}The names you see will be different and there will likely be more than one list style.See also Willam van Weelden's pages and the RoboHelp Tour on my site (look in the New Features).http://www.wvanweelden.eu/robohelp/lists/lists.phphttp://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/rh_tour/index.htm

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@petergrainge

[Guest]

Thank you Peter. I know that I need to stop using the combination list style and paragraph style for each numbered or bulleted item.

What I don't understand is how to do that without essentially rewriting the entire code of each topic directly in the html.

I can't get the old styles to change smoothly to new styles. For example, if I have 3 numbered steps like this

1 text

2 text

3 text

If I had an indented bullet below the 3rd numbered line & if I try to apply a new bulleted list style to it, it doesn't change. If I apply normal to it, to "clear the decks" so it will take the new style & then apply the new bulleted list style, the numbered style above also changes. The OL tag didn't end below step 3 as seems to me it should have if I applied Normal to the line below.

The way it's looking now, it's going to take me a month to get this one help system changed over to new styles if I have to edit them all in html.

Do you know of any way to use the UI to get old styles converted to new styles? I have read your robo tour topics about list styles. They don't say anything about changing from old list styles to new list styles.

John

[Peter Grainge]

They don't say anything about changing from old list styles to new list styles.

Because I have only looked at that more recently.

Rather than thinking about rewriting the code in each topic, you need to be considering the use of multi-file find and replace tools.

First step will be a backup of the project - do not start without that.

Then plan your find and replace. What I outlined will do the bulk of the work and then you need to look at each topic and tweak where necessary.

A good tool will let you review each change before it is made. You might need to apply one class to some lists and another class to other lists. That's what you have to experiment with. I would have thought a day or two but not a month.

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@petergrainge

[Guest]

OK, thanks. Sorry your good advice about backup slightly too late. I can revert via Visual Source Safe if necessary.

Figured out about find & replace & just dived savagely in. Thanks for calming suggestions.

[Guest]

One more mystery about formatting bullets and numbered lists:

They seem loosely tied to the indent buttons somehow. Are they tied to the level of indent at the time I create the style? Or are the indent buttons just manual changes in 8.0?

Also, when I set a 0 value for indent in the lists style in Other, the numbers and bullets are off the page to the left. Is there some standard amount to enter here to make the numbers line up, or does it depend on the indent buttons again somehow?

Is there any way to affect the distance between bullet and text and between number and text?

Sorry to keep bothering you. I feel as if I am going around and around, trying the same things over and over.

john

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

I think that is answered in your other post at http://forums.adobe.com/message/2805716#2805716

Can we stick with one thread please as this is effectively all about the same issue?

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Guest]

Sorry, I was just replying to the emails & not spending any time reading the post ID string.

[Guest]

I think best description of how to deal with the styles, and answers to what was puzzling me, are found in my other

post, referred to above.

Basically, my solution is not to delete all the P tags, as described in this thread, but simply to move the "bulleted list" part of the tag out of the P tag and into the list class tag(s), leaving para & font info in the P tags.

This is going to make writing help a bit slower because of having to apply both a list style and a paragraph style to each bulleted para, but I need the P tags for Word conversion in printed docs.

[Peter Grainge]

After a while you will hardly notice the extra clicks.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Guest]

Well, yes. After years of having to restart numbering every time I needed to add a comment below a numbered step, this is nothing. What I really needed was a good system to remember where in the number of steps I was, as they do in Framemaker, or failing that, at least a default that the previous numbered list is always continued. Instead I got XHTML. Phew! I didn't know when I was well off!