rh2020 - RH frameless output slowness is it due to importing word files?

[Tejas Dandekar]

We have a frameless project and output. The source files are imported from word document. Does importing word files add anything to the topics that slows down the output?

[Tejas Dandekar]

Is it something to do with the Skin? Any pointers?

[Amebr]

Depending on how you imported the documents, there could be a lot of inline and rubbish code in the topics which would blow out the individual topic sizes. I suppose it could cause slowness, just because the files sizes are much larger. Replacing the incline code with clean css, and removing any unnecessary MS references might help, if you have very large projects - I wouldn't expect a huge impact in small projects.

I suppose there could also be some MS related code that interacts poorly with the RH output javascript etc. But you'd have to have a look at the code in your project to try to figure that out. My testing suggests that RH2020 does a much better job of importing clean code, but so much depends on the individual document as well.

[Tejas Dandekar]

Ok, here's another observation I looked at the source and output closely.

In fact, when I launch the help locally, the tiles/categories configured in the ToC showed up as expected so did the tile icons and titles. 

When I click and go 1 level inside to view the content, the content in fact loads first and then the rest of the frame - that is the header and the left navigation/ToC. The sequence of loading is:

1.  Content loads fastest and this is the same content imported from MS Word.
2.  Then the header and sub-header, the Exand All, Favorites etc.
3. Last the Toc in the left navigation pane. This loads the slowest.

Wonder what is the reason. So when the user navigates through the topics it is a slow performance.

I tried this on a local machine. I will disabling bread crumbs that won't make a difference though but something is slowing down the frame.

[Peter Grainge]

In addition to horribly munged code as @Amebr has covered which depends on how you clean up Word documents before import and the steps you follow when importing, the only thing RoboHelp also does it create a second CSS file. I can't see that would affect loading to a noticeable degree.

Also see if there is a difference between using the help locally and on a server. Some changes were made to server loading to improve times but they cannot be made for locally installed help.

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

[Amebr]

You definitely need to test with the help on a web server. I've found local performance is sometimes slow, but server performance is generally fine.