RH6 imports topic titles with underscores

[dbeebe]

I submitted a BUG report on this because this did not happen in X5. Does anyone have a workaround?

We recently upgraded from X5 to RH6. Our projects use a title field (this is set up in a template file), so the title gets automatically populated when we create new topics. This still works as expected.

However, if we import a topic from another project, the title is populated with underscores instead of spaces. So now we have to edit the titles--very annoying. I've looked everywhere to see if we can change a setting somewhere in RH6 (and in our template file), but I can't find anything that works.

Please tell me that this isn't a new "quirk" in RH6 that I'm going to have to tolerate indefinitely. Surely, our group isn't the only one out there with this situation.

I'd appreciate any help with this!
Thanks so much!
Diana

[johndaigle · Accepted solution]

Since this post was marked as "the answer" I've updated it to reflect a new "fix" provided in this Adobe TechNote:

Title changes to match file name when importing topics into RoboHelp 6

I've tried it and it works really well.
Thanx
john

[dbeebe]

John,
Thanks so much for the tip! I'll call this one answered and will pass this information on to my writers!

Diana

[Gravenstein]

I have what I think is essentially the same problem: when I import a topic, my title gets replaced by the filename. For a workaround, I took a different approach:
1. Import the file into RH6.
2. Go back to Windows and drop a copy of the original file on top of the imported one, overwriting it.

I compared content of the files and didn't see a problem. Mind you, I've only tested this on a few files (importing X5 files into RH6), but it seemed OK. I'd be interested to know if there's a problem in doing it this way.

G.

[Peter Grainge]

Gravenstein

It's not the same problem. Yours occurs when the topic being imported does not have a <title> tag, or at least an empty one.

Adobe have been made aware but each bug report ups the chances of a fix.

[johndaigle]

A fix for this problem has been posted as a TechNote. I have tried it and it works extremely well. It's simple to install and will save you a lot of time.

Title changes to match file name when importing topics into RoboHelp 6

[dbeebe]

Thanks so much! I appreciate your help!

Diana

[Guest]

Hello,

I installed the suggested fix ... twice. When I import a file, it still overwrites the content in the title tags with the filename. Any ideas?

Thank you!
Tracey

[Peter Grainge]

Welcome to the forum.

Please don't be offended when I suggest checking back the instructions very carefully. It's just that often in a scenario like this, placing the files in the wrong folder or similar is the cause.

[Guest]

Thanks Peter. I'm not offended, I had the same thought. :-) That is why I did it twice and had someone else verify it. It is in the right place. Any other ideas?

[Peter Grainge]

I can advise Adobe but I think they would need your project and the topics you are trying to import to be able to find out why it is not working for you. Is that possible?

Also before we go down that route, please create a new project and import one topic to confirm this happens in that project.

[Guest]

I created a new project and imported one file. It changed the content in the title tag. Did it twice just to make sure and both times it did that.

What do you think?
Thank you!

For more information, I had a coworker install the fix as well and it didn't work for him either.

[Jared Hess]

The fix doesn't work in my case.... of course I'm on a Vista machine with RH 6 (sigh... I can't wait until RH 7).

After applying the "fix", I'm getting the entire full pathway to the file as the title. For example:
D:\DocProjects\V42\PC-DMIS Core\12_toolbars_topics\Active_Arms_Toolbar.htm

Which is a real pain to edit. So I'm installing the old .dll back so that I only have the underscores...the lesser of two bugs.

[Jared Hess]

Ok... so it was my luck to have to import over a hundred topics into a project. Is there a text file / database where the filenames for associated .htm files are stored? I'm wanting to do a quick find and replace to replace underscores on these imported files with spaces. Is this possible, or will i need to go the topics one by one to eradicate these underscores?

[Peter Grainge]

Jared

It can be done but it leaves your file names with underscores and all the links, TOC items etc without them. Tends to break them! :-)

To fix those you then need to do lots more find and replace stuff which requires a knowledge of regular expressions.

[Guest]

I have been working with support at RoboHelp with this issue for a while now. We found out why the new dll didn't fix the problem. RH development is aware of the issue and is working on another fix.

We import files into folders. We do it by right-clicking the folder and clicking Import then locating the already created file and importing it. RH changed the title doing it this way. We found that if we import it to the root of the project, it doesn't change the title.

So, what we were told to do is to make a copy of the file that you are importing into a folder other than your project folder. Then open the original project. When you import the file into a folder, import the copy of the file that is in a different folder. Make sure it is a copy of the most recent file because it will overwrite the one in your project folder.

I hope that makes sense. I will check back to see if you have any questions that I can answer.

[Amebr-ke0mH4]

I don't suppose there's a fix for the fix?

I followed the steps in the technote and now I have the same problem as JaredHess, where the entire path and file name replaces the topic title.

I understand the work around posted by Tracey Z, but it would be nice to have a proper fix. So if anyone has news, I'd be grateful.

[HKabaker]

If anyone is interested, I have a Perl Script that picks up the first line of text formatted h1 like this:

< h1 >Re-inventing the Wheel< /h1 >

and inserts it between < title > .....and...< /title>, replacing anything that may be there already. So you get

< title >Re-inventing the Wheel< /h1 >

It applies this process to every html file in a given directory. The file name is untouched.

Also, FAR has some fancy tricks for advanced users.

Email me off list if you're interested.

Harvey

[Peter Grainge]

Does the title in the CPD get corrected somehow? Maybe by trashing it and recreating it?

[HKabaker]

Peter,

Good question. I'll test.

I've used this in html files that were generated elsewhere with an empty title, before importing them into RH.

Tracey Z says:

"We import files into folders. We do it by right-clicking the folder and clicking Import then locating the already created file and importing it. RH changed the title doing it this way. We found that if we import it to the root of the project, it doesn't change the title. "


When I want to import a file into a folder, I simply select that folder in the Project Manager and, for good measure, go to Topics view for that folder rather than all folders.

Then I click File | Import | html file and navigate to select the file(s) to be imported. The imported file goes into the selected folder, if you're careful. The title is preserved. (By the way, I have the MDBMS update installed.)

If you accidentally un-select the folder, the file usually goes to the root.

Harvey

[Peter Grainge]

Before import, that's OK. Thought you meant after import.

[HKabaker]

Peter,

With a project in RH 6 closed, I edited the html source to change the title in two files. Saved the changed files.

Launched RH 6 and opened the project. The titles were changed in the topic list, which means RH must have updated the .cpd database table.

Of course, the TOC entries didn't automatically update, as they never do when you change a topic title in RH.

[Peter Grainge]

Take a look at the title in Topic Properties. I know somewhere along the line I hit some sort of problem with this sort of trick.

[HKabaker]

It's changed there, too. Did you close the project one more time and open it again?

When I drag the topic into the TOC, it uses the new title. But the existing TOC entries wouldn't take the new title from the TOC properties dialog. I had to delete and rebuild it.

H