Combining Child Projects (Unmerging) in Robohelp2020

That load time issue you mention in the reasons to use a merged project, is that still an issue with the actual software and actual processor performances?

Is More manageable projects what you mean by my reference to load time? That was a project of 14,000 topics on a much older version of RoboHelp and when processors were much slower. Usually people are changing to merged help where that is an issue. Whether or not it will be an issue going the other way is something I cannot tell you.

Just wondering, if I merge, if links to external chm's (in luggage files)  will be functionning. I guess not...How could I solve that? Or could that be a reason NOT to unmerge (what you meant with logical structure)?

When you unmerge all the content will be in one project. Thus a link to what was in an external file will now have to be a link to the topic in the same project. As such the path will be wrong and need to be changed. I covered that here. https://community.adobe.com/t5/robohelp-discussions/combining-child-projects-unmerging-in-robohelp2020/m-p/12656094#M142369

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My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

@Olivier Toebosch It is not a number based criterion. Merging can be because of the shear number of topics but it can also be logical structure reasons. Reasons for Merging Help (grainge.org)

I appreciate you asked about unmerging but the reasons apply either way. I would say don't merge unless you need to but when one of the reasons I cover applies, then consider it. What you merge or unmerge, the next guy along will do the opposite.

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My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

I can only see instructions there on how to merge a project, not import the topics from the children into the parent.

What you have to do is simple enough but a bit painful and time consuming. Open the parent in 2020 and then import the topics.That will bring in the topic, associated CSS and any images. You can import all the topics in any one folder in one operation.

From the Import context menu make sure you choose HTML Topic, otherwise it will not import topics correctly.

After importing the contents of a folder, you need to do some work on them.

• Make sure they are pointing to your parent project CSS, unless you want them using what gets imported. The easiest way is to right click them in the folder in Contents and multi-select them, then right click and choose Properties. Delete the existing CSS first before then applying the correct CSS.
• Next add them to the TOC.
• Then look at the reports.
  • Broken Links. This bit will be messy and perhaps left until the end. The relative location of topics will be changing.
  • Unused files.
  • Unreferenced Topics.
  • Topic Properties when done to make sure everything is in the TOC.
  • Style Sheets. I expect at the end you will only want to see one applied to all topics.
• You will also need to check any tagging and update your presets.

Above all, make a backup of where you are now and I would do the same at least daily until it's all working.

It's possible to copy all the Contents folders across in Explorer but I would have concerns about how that works. Subject to frequent backups you could try it but I think it will create more issues than it solves.

BTW. How many topics in all roughly? Whilst there is no maximum number in theory, you don't want to create a monster.

Good luck in sorting this out. 

________________________________________________________
My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

Does this thread help? - https://community.adobe.com/t5/robohelp-discussions/unmerging-merged-projects/td-p/3863550 - sounds like a fairly simple process.