.emz instead of .gif

Report · Mar 17, 2009

I'm using RoboHelp HTML and with it I'm using Word 2007 as my editor. (Long story as to why I don't use RoboHelp for Word...)

In it I have hundreds of pages, each with tables, text, and images.

Yesterday I produced a project and viewed one of the pages. Two of the eight images showed up on the page, but the other six were red 'x' instead. I right-click on the image and it says it's looking for img0006.gif ... so I copy the URL and paste it on my address bar, nothing.

So I browse to the network server and look at the files in the folder. There is a img0002.gif (which is one of the working images). There's also a img0006.emz. But the .html file made by RoboHelp is trying to reference img0006.gif, which isn't there.

So, it appears to occasionally (this is the first time I encountered this issue, and there's hundreds and hundreds of topic pages in our manual) save the file as .emz but still tries to refer to it as a .gif.

I tried cutting the contents of the document out, pasting it in another Word document, then copy/pasting it back in. I also tried cutting and then re-pasting the images one at a time. I reproduced and re-copied to the server each time with no improvement.

Then on one publish, suddenly all the images started working correctly. It appears to have saved them all as .gif and refer to them as .gif so they all show up right.

Since it took me a couple of hours to get it finally working, it's very frustrating. So, what happened? Why did it save as .emz instead of .gif, and still refer to the .gif location? And how did it get fixed? I want to make sure this doesn't happen to me again - huge time waster.

To get the images into Word, I modify my screenshots in Microsoft Digital Image Editor and then copy/paste them into Word. Since RoboHelp 4, this has worked fine for me.

Report · Mar 17, 2009

There are several issues here..
1. I would suggest using RH's HTML editor instead of Word. I'm assuming you're output is HTML help (CHM) or web help.

2. Images should be linked in to the topic files in RH, NOT copied and pasted in. If you're using the HTML editor provided with RoboHELP then this will of course be easier.

3. Work locally on your C: drive if your project and/or graphics files are on a network server you will encounter problems.

Obviously make backup copies to a network location every so often, but you should work from a LOCAL drive. Also that means a folder under C: NOT under "My documents" as this can also result in problems.