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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
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:"Segoe UI",sans-serif"><a href="" style="color:blue; tex
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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?
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Another thing to look at is what your conversion settings are set up as - how are you dealing with hyperlinks there?
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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?
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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:"Segoe UI",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.
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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
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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:
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,
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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.)