Hyperlinks not transferring from MS Word to RH

[Kevin36801248dp1z]

Hello!

So I am fairly new to RoboHelp and coding, I only started using this program two months ago and had no codng experience prior. It's has been a bit of a learning curve, but I am starting to get the hang of it and tried some of the training modules available for it. I am however having an issue which although isn't stopping me from doing my job, it is much more time consuming then I feel it needs to be.

I am currently working on doing a full update of our Knowledge Base which is upwards of 900 articles. We review the documents on MS Word and then transfer them over to RoboHelp, however the issue I am having is with my hyperlinks. As soon as I paste them into RoboHelp from MS Word, the destination of all my links dissapears and I have to manually edit each one to add the destination into all of the links. They transfer over and still look like hyperlinks (blue and underlined) its just the link is broken every time. Some links are just project files which I can sort out relatively quickly, but some documents have upwards of 15 links to different external pages which is a pain to have to edit manually each time.

I've skimmed through some of the articles here that seem similar to my issue but most of what I have found is related to converting them to PDF's . Any ideas on a work around for this? 

Appreciate your time and thanks in advance!

Kev

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

I would kind of expect internal ones to break since you're moving the location from where the Word doc is to where the RH topic is and unless they have maintained the same relative path to each other, the destination filename would change. Is this also happening to external links that are already well formed HTML URLs?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Another thing to look at is what your conversion settings are set up as - how are you dealing with hyperlinks there?

[Kevin36801248dp1z]

Thanks for the response!

All of my links and HTML URL's seem correct and all work properly in Word but they dissapear the moment I paste them into RH so that there is no destination regardless of project file or url to a website. (Not sure if that really clears it up more!)  That being said your comment on conversion settings might actually be what I am looking for if there is something related to permissions as far as copy/pasting. This might be a beginner question but where would I be able to view these settings? I originally thought it could have something to do with paste options like with Word and Outlook where you can keep source formatting but I haven't been able to find that on RH?

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

You said you are pasting in from Word. That is not the same as importing and there are no conversion settings.

Below are two links. The first is one I created in RoboHelp. The second is one pasted into RoboHelp from a Word document.

<p><a href="http://www.grainge.org">www.grainge.org</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p style="margin-top:8px; margin-bottom:8px"><span style="font-size:11pt"><span style="line-height:115%"><span style="font-family:&quot;Segoe UI&quot;,sans-serif"><a href="" style="color:blue; text-decoration:underline">www.grainge.org</a></span></span></span></p>

Note that RoboHelp creates the link properly by including the link within the a href tag, which I have highlighted in red. That is missing from what was pasted in and without that in the HTML world the link will not work. Pasting in also brings in a lot of inline styling that may give you grief in other ways later on. The first link in my RoboHelp topic is the colour defined for links in my CSS. The second link has that CSS styling overridden by the inline styling.

The links should work if you import but importing has its own issues so it's your choice of poison. 🙂

________________________________________________________

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

[Kevin36801248dp1z]

Thanks for the information!

It seems as though I will have to go with the lesser of two evils in this case. I had played around with importing the documents themselves to see if that works but as you mentioned, it creates its own share of different problems. I'm thinking the importing would work better in a situation of creating a new project vs. maintenance of an exisiting. 

Thank you for your help and I'll take a look at the site you provided as well, still all new for me so learning a bit day by day 🙂

Cheers,

Kev

[Amebr]

I currently have a Word review process which might at least help smooth things for you. No silver bullets unfortunately.

We review in Word with track changes turned on so we can see the updates for existing topics.

For updates to topics I mostly retype the content in RH, as the changes are relatively small and don't take too much time to do.

For new topics, or significantly changed existing topics I do the following:

1. Make a copy of the word document and make sure all the track changes have been accepted or rejected.
2. Apply a special macro-enabled template. This template has styles with names matching the RH styles I use, plus a few additonaly ones I use in some cleanup macros. The macros do things like replace smart quotes with straight quotes, remove manual page breaks and section breaks, remove blank paragraphs, replace non-breaking spaces with regular space, replace text boxes with plain text and add a commen to check they converted properly, make all images inline and a bunch of other things I came across over the years.
3.  Run through the document dealing with any last little tracked changes that were missed, or typos, and applying the correct styles as necessary.
4. In a temporary project, import the cleaned Word document. I suggest temporary, in case something goes wrong with the import or scripts. That way you don't risk messing up your production project.
5.  Run some scripts on the imported content to clean up some Word crud. (I believe the New UI import is much cleaner, so you might not need this step.) I also have one to remove the search string code from any RH links, which my SMEs might have copied in - these can mess with the google analytics results, if you're using that, so I strip off anything after the .htm part of the url.
6.  Clean up any formatting in the topic that didn't apply correctly on import.
7. Apply your production css file to all topics.
8. Import new topics into your production project - answer "No" to the dialog asking to import the css file so you don't to overwrite your production css with an old copy.
9. For updates to existing topics that I've chosen to do this way, I copy the content manually into the topic, so I don't end up with incorrect duplicate topics.
10. Apply the hyperlinks and add any RH specific things like topic toc etc. Depending on how the links were done in Word, some of the links should be there and you just need to replace hard-coded website part with one or more ../ to make the link relative in the project. You might be able to do a couple of find/replace actions on the topics to fix those, but will need to be careful to get the right number of ../ for each link. (I can't check at the moment, because I'm getting a weird error trying to run the import - some update seems to have broken something.)

The Word macros aren't necessary but they do help streamline things I you have the expertise. I'm not sure what, if any scripts might be needed in RH New UI. Mine are for Classic and the entire scripting language changed and is essentially undocumented, so I can't offer any advice.

Anyway, that looks horrifyingly long, but it actually works pretty well to get clean topics with less work. 

And remember, changes to existing topics I mostly just retype as it often ends up being as quick as trying to automate anything. Just significant rewrites get the above treatment,

[Amebr]

Oh one cleanup step I forgot, was after you import the topics in to your production project, you should check for any css files in the files where you you imported the topics, and delete any that shouldn't be there (usually you only want your one project css file, but there might be cases were you do need others.)