Workflow with external writers without expertise or access to RoboHelp

Disclaimer: My comments all relate to Robohelp Classic and web output only as I haven't used New UI in production or for pdf output, so you would need to do some testing to determine what may have changed. However, hopefully this will give you a starting point and some ideas on where to look for problems as you test solutions.

For new content, I provide a Word template for the SMEs to use. For updated content, I provide a Word document generated from RH and instruct the SMEs to use track changes to mark their updates.

However, as I can't guarantee that the documents will have used the template, or that users will have followed it, or what else may have been done to the document in the meantime, I never import those documents directly into my production projects. Additionally the import leaves a lot of inline styling that can cause problems in the output.

To mitigate these issues I do the following:

1.  Tidy up a copy of the document the SMEs give me (a copy, in case something goes wrong, and as a history of what I received). This consists of running macros to tidy up as much as I can automatically, then eyeballing the file to fix the stuff missed by the macro or which can't be automatically tidied.
2. Import the document into a temp project, run further scritps to clean up leftover ms word styling and automatically apply some things and eyeball for any further tidying required. Numbering and images can be especially problematic.
3. Import the tidied topics into my production project. OR copy/paste selected text from the temp project into the production project **see further info below
4. Fix/insert all links and RH features such as expanding text, topic placeholders, index entries, toc links, variables

For updated content I usually find it easier to manually type the changes directly in the topics. This ensures I don't end up with a new topic with a different name, and don't have to redo index entries, hyperlinks, toc links, topic toc placeholders etc.

However, if there are a lot of changes, or complex formatting such as tables, I'll follow the steps above, noting that I may have to redo things.

Note: Don't paste directly from Word as this pastes all sorts of inline code into the topic. If you want to copy from Word, copy and paste into Notepad first, then from Notepad into RH. You'll need to apply styles, bullets, numbering etc manually.

The big caveat is that the word import (and maybe copy/paste?) may be significantly better in New UI, so may require less cleanup in the temp project.

The biggest thing is always getting the Word doc as clean as possible before import as the things SMEs manage to do with a very simple template and instructions borders on the magical. 😛