document restying advice needed

[alansinclair]

I'm tasked with getting good-looking printed document from Robohelp sources, and need advice, please, on the order in which to work. Peter Grainge's Printed Documentation is helpful, but I'm thrashing around in the details.

Our document began as a Word doc, which was imported into RoboHTML to create .CHM online help. It's been hacked around in RH and now the generated printed doc is a bit of a mess, but I have to work with what we've got -- the RH sources (which are .htm files of course.) The doc organization is ok, just the format/styles are a problem.

I have the Word template which the original document came from, but the import into RH seems to have changed most, removing spaces from the style names. So it does not work well when used as the template for "Printed Document Appearance"

When I generate, it seems impossible to map all the project's CSS styles to MS Word styles, because for example the MS Word List Bullet styles are simply not shown in the mapping dialog pulldowns.

Can anyone recommend a strategy for getting to grips with this? I'm less-than-expert with styles & formatting, but understand a bit (my little knowledge no doubt being the dangerous thing here.) I don't mind working topic by topic through the RH source, fixing the styles for each item (should I add missing styles to the CSS?) , but would it be more effective to approach it differently?

[alansinclair]

quote:

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Originally posted by: Kathy T Casey
Alan

It just gets curiouser and curiouser doesn't it?

Do the fields disappear when you hide the formatting marks using the Show/Hide button on the toolbar in Word?

Regards

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Oh, I'm being so dumb! Good-bye, feet! Yes, thank you, the fields are wonderfully gone when I turn off Show All in options. The whole document is starting to look usable.

With any luck this thread can end after a last question: Kathy, you mentioned using a macro to copy the content and paste it into a new template. That would be very helpful for my project, as it needs to be in three different printed forms. Could you share your macro? (If direct email is better mine is alan at deterministicnetworks dot com, but of course macros might not be something you'd want to share.)

Thanks so much -- what a relief to be so much nearer decent single-source docs! Managing RH source plus three different-flavored Word docs has been stupid.
alan

[Kathy_T_Casey]

Alan

I just created my macro using the standard Macro record function in Word and then attached it to a toolbar button in first template.

But it would look something like this:

Selection.WholeStory
Selection.Copy
Documents.Add Template:= _
"<your-drive-name>:\<your-Templates-directory>\<your-second-templates-name>.dot", _
NewTemplate:=False, DocumentType:=0
Selection.Paste

Sounds like your almost there!!

Regards

[alansinclair]

Thanks, that's exactly the starter I needed. After RH has batch-generated the .CHM and .DOC files I'm hoping to run a .BAT file which repeats something along the lines of
WINWORD.EXE" /mMyMacro Newdoc.doc
for each of the three .DOCs

all the best
Alan