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Question

RH 8 for Word losing WYSIWYG images

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
September 21, 2009
3 replies
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Hi everyone,

I have been using RoboHelp since its BlueSky Software days to develop documentation as consultant for a leading 3D modeling and rendering application. My last project was done with RH6 using Word 2003 on a 32 bit XP machine.

For the next round, I suggested upgrading to RH8 (in fact, I am going to purchase my own license instead of using a company's license), so I installed the 30 days demo on my week-old machine - Vista 64 bit, 8 cores, 12GB RAM, Office 2007, all that jazz.

I copied the previous project one-to-one over to the new machine, opened it successfully and performed a test compilation from the existing documents without resaving anything. As far as I could tell, everything went ok, the final CHM output was identical to the output of RH6.

So I started doing minor edits like changing the version number of the product and a couple of links. I saved the document containing the start page (got saved to DOC file in compatibility mode as expected and without any problems) and compiled again. This time, the two images (banner and a kind of splash screen found on the start page) were missing.

A look at the Images list in RH showed that they were indeed missing from the project, albeit in the bitmaps folder defined for the project. For obvious reasons, all images in the project are shown as WYSIWYG and not TrueCode. So I double-clicked one of the two missing images and the bitmap dialog did not know the file name of the image embedded in the Word document! So I selected the file name again, checked TrueCode, resaved the document and the image appeared on the Images list. Switched back to WYSIWYG, resaved the document and it was gone again.

To make sure I was not dreaming, I started a new empty project, added one of the built in button bitmaps to it, saved the document (this time a native DOCX file) and got the same problem - no image in compiled CHM, no image on the Images list. Switched to TrueCode and it appeared again. A look at the intermediate HTML files showed of course that the image was not exported. A look at the intermediate RTF format using Notepad showed the file name in curly brackets where it should have been, so it looks like there was some miscommunication between RH8 and Word.

To make sure this was not a Word 2007 issue, I installed Word 2003, switched RH8 to use that and tried again working with my existing project, but got exactly the same results - TrueCode works, WYSIWYG appears to get forgotten. In fact, it turned out that about half of the over 1000 images used in the project were missing after a while as the documents containing them got resaved. Those that were left either belonged to files that were not resaved yet, or happened to be left as TrueCode due to lower visual importance.

Sinced most of my images in the source are WYSIWYG, one would possibly propose to switch them all to TrueCode. This would not work though (I tried, so I know ) - for all images that were automatically converted to TrueCode, I got a {bmc } entry with no file name whatsoever. (Thankfully I had a full backup of the project ready to get copied over to restore the mess, otherwise I wouldn't have figured out which entry was what image). This was to be expected, because any attempt to open a source DOC file and double-click an image leads to an empty file name, so RH8 is unable to see what was saved in the file by RH6.

So at this point I have 25 days of evaluation time before I either

1. Find a solution to this problem and spend the dough on a license

2. Dust off my old single core machine and do another round of RH6 development (I don't look forward to this).

On a side note, I am getting the error opening the compiled CHM from the compiler dialog's View button reported in another discussion when compiling the existing project, but NOT when compiling a newly created one. Oh, and my "smart quotes" replacement is completely disabled.

Any assistance in this matter would be really appreciated! Thanks in advance!

RH for Word

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princess_betty

Inspiring

I'm not sure if this issue has been resolved, but I'll add my two cents.

Based on your post, several issues are involved: RH upgrade and Word upgrade.

From my experience:

MS Word 2007 is not completely 2003 compatible - even though it says so.
The save as rtf from Word vs the save as rtf from RH differ. I believe RH uses its own save as rtf. File size of the rtf files differ drastically.
Putting an image directly into the word doc causes problems in one form or another, so you should always use the RH menus to insert your images.
When an image is inserted into a word doc, if you don't insert it correctly, a copy of Paint is also inserted behind the scenes tied to the image so that you can edit the image directly in the doc. This not only makes the doc file huge, it may be causing the problems you are seeing as I am not sure how RH deals with an image tied to Paint. To determine if you image is tied to Paint, right-click the image and see if the edit image option is available because that means it is tied to Paint.

There is something you could try. Export your RH6 project into a doc that has the images in it. Then create a new project and import the doc. Specify in the conversion of this doc to create images. That may fix the broken links you are seeing in true code. (As a side note, working in true code will increase your computer's performance.) Letting RH convert the images to bmp files should also automatically insert the true code {bmc... etc.) Note that images are converted in the order that they appear in your doc, i.e., first image will be called image001.bmp and so on. Yes, this will be confusing. At some point you may want to rename the image file to something meaningful to you and change the corresponding image in the bmc in your doc file.

If that doesn't work, if I were you, I would go through the doc and one by one save each image with a name you understand, then immediately insert the image using the RH menu and then delete the WYSIWYG image. Remember to save the images as bmp files. During the compile, RH converts these images to GIFs behind the scenes so your output file is smaller. As daunting as this sounds, you won't regret this. Your doc will open faster and be smaller making it easier to manipulate, and you can edit or replace the bmp file and the new image will appear when you recompile.

Note: if you choose to use either of the above suggestions, you may need to use RH imaging tool to resize your pix. The bmp image should always be the size you want it to appear in your output. In Word and WYSIWYG, people have a tendency to insert an image and resize it for printing and this does not convert well.

Another thing you may want to consider is saving the doc using the Word 2007 default. As you mentioned, when you created a test project, the file was a docx and not doc.

bobozmeyAuthor

Participant

Thank you very much for your time, Princess Betty!

No, the issue has not been resolved, but given the size of the project (which was originally started around 12 years ago and already includes thousands of topics and images), I opted to solve it the hard(ware) way and use my original 6 years old desktop running Windows XP with RH6 and Office 2003. This has proven to be safe and the only thing I had to do is use the second input of my new monitor to switch between my new system and the old one.The amount of images (all 8 bit BMPs produced in Photoshop) does not allow me to spend any additional time tweaking stuff.

I think the pile of keyboards and mice on my desk is a small price to pay as I have to deliver the final build in less than 3 months.

My client is switching to online HTML help soon so this might be the last CHM delivery I will have to do.

I am not going to investigate this further because my trial expired and I am not spending money on something I might never get working correctly.

Thanks everybody for the input!

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

As you would expect from Murphy's Law (or the Devil, if you want), today my old machine decided to die.

So now I am dead in the water, with the RH8 trial expired (but still not working neither with Word 2003 nor with 2007) and RH6 unaccessible on the old machine (thankfully, at least I made a backup of the project yesterday). Since my RH6 license was bought by my client and is under their name, the plan was for me to buy my own RH8 license this time around. But I am not spending $1K on something that is obviously not working on my machine.

Please stop looking for errors in my workflow, because I have been using this software for many years and it never had this issue. But two years ago Microsoft made an update to Word 2003 via the Windows Updater that broke indentation of HTML pages which forced me to revert to the previous Restore point and disable Window Updates on my old machine to prevent it from breaking my Robohelp. So in my experience, RH for Word is fairly touchy.

I am going to try to get my old machine repaired or look for replacement hardware where I could insert my existing harddrive and continue working.

Not an optimal solution, but I don't expect sombody in India to actually fix the software.

I wonder if I am going to get somebody from Adobe to actually look into this if I would spend the money on a new RH8 license?

I know you have said you have been using RH for years and to stop looking at your workflow but if this were not something to do with your project, then everyone would have this problem. I would also point out that you have not been using RH8 for years and it does not follow that something you have done or RH has done will work in a new version.

I have looked through the thread and I can see that my previous answers missed some points you had made, I was on holiday at the time this thread started so I skipped through things. Apologies for that.

In one post you say "for all the images that were automatically converted...". Does that mean that not all images were not converted? If they were not, that is a sign they were not imported via the RH insert menu but via the Word insert menu. Is that possible? That can cause corruption and maybe that is why the other images came up as blank.

The situation now is that you cannot try any of the things that Princess Betty has suggested. I am willing to take a look at the project to see if I can spot anything but no doubt you will cry NDA. I can get someone at Adobe to vouch for me if that helps. Otherwise I don't see what anyone on this forum can do now as you cannot try the suggestions, unless you have access to another machine. Indeed Adobe Support will be hard pressed to help you in that situation and the problem will not get to India unless we can verify that this is a RH issue.

What would you like us to do here on the forum?

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

Follow me @petergrainge

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Peter Grainge

Community Expert

There are already two threads running on this problem.

I have been sent a document by one person and will look into as soon as I can. However, I am on holiday at the moment so it will be delayed a bit.

Are you compiling with the images showing in WYSIWYG? If so, that has always been a NO NO. Convert to true code and then compile.

Post back whether or not that changes things.

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

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bobozmeyAuthor

Participant

Hi Peter,

Thank you for your answer.

Once again, the problem is not the compiling per se.

As I have explained already, the WYSIWYG images do not appear on the Images and Multimedia>Images list.

Steps:

1. Created a new project

2. Added a new image (WYSIWYG)

3. Saved the source file

RESULT: Image is NOT on the Images list (althoug it appears in Word)

If I would close the project, open it again and double-click the image in Word, RH has lost any knoweledge of where the image came from.

By extension, the same happens with an existing project from RH6 where all images were stored as WYSIWYG already. As I mentioned, it is not possible to switch to TrueCode at this point, because all Images would be replaced with empty {bmc } entries, no file names, thus corrupting the project beyond repair (I have 1053 images in the project and cannot restore them one by one).

The missing images after compiling are just a side effect of RH8 not seeing them in the source files in the first place.

So all the threads I found that had a problem with compiling do not apply to my case IMVHO, althrough I could be wrong.

RH8 compiles correctly if I copy all the files from RH6 and leave all RTFs there since no resaving occurs. The moment I resave a DOC which replaces the RTF with a new version, all images are gone. As I mentioned, the RTF appears to contain the correct file name in it, but RH8 does not seem to "see" it.

Short story: RH6 works with that same project, RH8 does not.

Regarding the question why I am bothering using Word for CHM development, it has historical reasons - the original project was started in RoboHelp about 10 years ago and initially the DOC files were sent through a custom CHM compiler inhouse, so my contract required me to work that way. After a lot of begging I got them to switch to RoboHelp 5 and then to 6 and allow me to produce and deliver the CHM myself (since their pipeline was killing all colors, fonts and formatting!), but the requirement to deliver sources as DOCs remained.

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

You'll have to bear with me as I am taking potshots at this problem and just looking quickly, also it is many years since I used RH for Word professionally.

I take it you are not inserting the images using RH's menus and are either pasting in or using Word's insert menu. I recall that always gave problems. I understand your reluctance but what I recall was that there is a cut off point with the number of images. Afer that, if you didn't do it the right way, you have a problem.

If I don't get a chance to look at this properly in the next couple of days, I will ask someone with more RH for Word knowledge to take a look. Otherwise, I will give it more attention when I am back from holiday but I doubt you want to wait just over another week!

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

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Captiv8r

Legend

Hi there

This is more of a curiosity question than anything else. Sorry.

If you are creating HTML based output, why on earth are you using RoboHelp for Word? Most authors that are creating HTML based output use RoboHelp HTML.

Cheers... Rick