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October 8, 2009
Question

Importing Word documents into Robohelp 8: topic content is in a text box

  • October 8, 2009
  • 3 replies
  • 851 views

Hi

I think I am doing standard stuff, but I have never used the import from Word function in RoboHelp before...

I used  file > import to import a Word document, paginating on heading1 and heading2. All is fine, except that all the text of every topic is contained within a text box.

Can I stop this happening? (Or fix it easily?)

(I hope it is not relevant, and don't want to go into this unless it is relevant: but the Word document was actually the printed output from another RoboHelp project.)

Thanks and regards,

Peter Braham

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    3 replies

    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    October 8, 2009

    Can we stand this on its head? If you have another RoboHelp project with the required topics, why not use those rather than the Word document. I have never tested importing an ex RH printed document for that reason but it would not surprise me if that were the cause.


    See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

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    October 8, 2009

    Yes, we could transfer a number of topics in one hit. The import from Word was going to be easier...

    If there is no other answer, I'll work around it that way.

    BTW I presume then, that something in the Word document tags it as 'from Robohelp' and Robohelp interprets that to mean 'surround all text with a text box'?

    I did save the Word document as an RTF, opened it and saved as a Word 2003 document, and imported that: with exactly the same result!

    Peter

    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    October 8, 2009

    What I am thinking is that any Word import needs some cleaning up and the HTML is generally not good, blame Word for that. By importing the topics, you avoid that.

    The document is not exactly tagged as "from RH" and other products may well create documents in the same way. Bottom line is the way the document is created in Word seems to mean you get this problem in RH. It would probably be quite easy to find a workaround for that but you are still left with a Word import rather than a better RH import.

    These forums will testify to the number of problems Word imports can cause because of Word's code.


    See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

    Use the menu (bottom right) to mark the Best Answer or Highlight particularly useful replies. Found the answer elsewhere? Share it here.