Can I use RH just to edit some html by-the-page?

[JGaf]

Hi,

I've used RH for a few years now (WebHelp w/Zoom Search) on a couple of our software documentation projects which much success.

I was given some auto-generated java/api related technical html pages (all self-contained nicely in its own "project" but not a RH project) which needs to be reviewed and edited.  To edit it, I do not want to import this as a project into RH because it's going to generate all this extra stuff in the code, have to import the css, skins, etc.  It'll be a mess.   I really just need to review and touch a lot of text - some for english translations and others for just normal editing.  We are talking more than 1000+ files which need to be reviewed and modified.

Other than opening the html page and going to "view source".......can I somehow use the RH interface to modify the text directly? 

It's dangerous to do a global find/replace on common phrases, I really need to look at each modification individually........however tedious..

is it possible to edit html by-the-page in RH?

Any suggestions?

[Captiv8r]

Yeah, RoboHelp used to allow doing exactly that. Opening a single HTML page and making edits without being in the context of a project. But that fell by the wayside a few versions ago. Not sure when.

Note that even if you import hundreds of topics, there is no horrible additional code added. I think what you may be thinking is what happens if you choose to generate the output. Because it's that generation process that actually adds all the additional code to the topics.

As long as you just import the HTML pages to view them and tweak them, you could then just copy them back out once finished. I think if I were going to do that, I'd create a new empty project, then create a folder. And import them into the folder. That way all the HTML pages would be together in the same folder and that would simplify the copying down the road.

Cheers... Rick

[JGaf]

Thank you for the quick response -

I tried to create/open a new project and import a bunch of top level html files.  RH did add a lot of meta tag stuff, "rewrote" the tables, changed some accented letter html codes to "blocks" (frustrating me)  and automatically changed/rewrote link paths.  Ok, so that didn't work.

Then, I created another new project and just imported ONE html file.  It did everything listed above but change link paths because it didn't have the new filepath to reference ( the linked files were not in the project).

Maybe I need to do more research to find another software that will make it a little easier to edit the code.  I may have to dust off Homesite (gasp!) ...but one negative with using Homesite is I can't edit files in something like Design mode - but it'll surely be better than Notepad; at least Homesite colors the code so it's easier to spot and doesn't add anything extra or automatically change anything......

thanks again!

[Captiv8r]

You might investigate Adobe Dreamweaver. Or CoffeeCup Software's HTML Editor.

The HTML Editor - Your best Web design friend | CoffeeCup Software

Cheers... Rick