Word disables RH add-in macros

[Benjamin_H]

I've been using Robohelp for Word 7.0 with MS Word 2003 SP3 for months without any issues until yesterday. When I launched it yesterday and opened my help project, I was greeted with a message from Word indicating that RH's installed macros were disabled because they were not digitally signed.
I did a little research and found that if Word has it's macro security set "High", add-ins will be disabled if they are not digitally signed. I assumed that the latest MS security update changed my Word security to "High" and so I changed the setting to "medium". This allowed the add-ins for RH to run, but only after Word asking me if I want to enable the macros every time I start the project. And for some reason, I sometimes have to re-enable the RH add-ins to make things work. Really annoying...

My questions are:
1. Why doesn't Adobe provide digitally signed dlls for RH for Word?
2. Is there something else I should do so that Word doesn't perpetually bug me about the RH dlls?
Thanks for any suggestions,
Ben

[RoboWizard]

Welcome to our community, Ben

I tend to avoid mixing RoboHelp and Word myself. Heck, I do all I can to avoid coming close to Word period! But as I understand it, the warning is coming from some special macros that are part of the Word Template RoboHelp uses. Macros are just Word scripting, and that's about as far removed from DLLs as a HumVee is from a go kart.

So I'm just guessing that maybe it's not feasible to use digital signage with scripting. But that's just a guess.

Cheers... Rick

[Benjamin_H]

Rick,
Thanks for the comments.

We use RH for Word partly because we have a long history of help projects that we continue to evolve. (I've been using RH since the early 90's.) Your point is valid though; maybe I should take another look at RoboHTML.

As to the macros vs dll question, RoboHelp uses a file named "RoboHook.dll" as an "add-in" for Word. It shows up the Templates and Add-ins dialog. Word refers in several places to digitally signing macros, so it must be possible (though not necessarily easy).

Thanks for your comments.
Ben

[Benjamin_H]

Updated info:

I have determined that the problem was not caused by the latest MS security patch. It was caused by a new version of the "MYOB" accounting software that we use, which installs a Word add-in. If I remove this add-in, the RoboHelp functionality is restored without any complaints from Word. In fact, I can set Word's macro security setting to "High" and not get any complaints from Word.

It appears not to have been a RH problem at all. My bad.

Ben