Import a website generated by Robohelp long ago

[Pantaloons]

I'm not a Robohelp user myself, so please bear with me.  I've got a user who has a fresh install of Robohelp on her PC.  There is a website that she has created using Robohelp, but she doesn't have any kind of project file anymore.  The generated website does exist, though, and seems to be working fine.  Is there a way to import that site and its structure into a project so that she can resume working on it?

Thanks!

[Captiv8r · Accepted solution]

Hi there

Many things are possible. The first hurdle will be to ask if she has access via FTP or whatever to the actual files on the web server? If so, the files will need to be copied down to her PC.

Once that step has been accomplished, she will need to reverse engineer those files into a RoboHelp project. Likely the best and fastest approach will be to purchase a script from HelpEssentials that will make short work of it.

Click here to visit HelpEssentials

Cheers... Rick

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

It’s called “reverse engineering” – see Peter Grainge’s site (grainge.org) for freebie ways to creating the RH project or Willam’s site – wvanweelden.eu – for a paid version.

[Pantaloons]

Thanks guys!  She is going to import each file into Robohelp and proceed from there.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

You can’t import the “finished” HTML back into a RH project without running it through a script like Rick suggested – you’ll contaminate your RH topics with the extra bits that RH throws in when it generates the help files at the end of the process. Rick has a cooking metaphor that he uses to describe this (but I’ve forgotten it) ;>)

[Amebr]

I think it's along the lines of trying to bake biscuits from biscuit crumbs rather that biscuit dough.

[Captiv8r]

LOL, you are both pretty close. My analogy is along the lines of baking cookies. You use RoboHelp to mix the raw cookie dough and later bake it to make the cookies. Sucking a published topic into RoboHelp is just like taking a baked Chocolate Chip cookie and crumbling it up and mixing it with a new batch of cookie dough.

I have an article describing what happens at the link below:

Click here to view

Cheers... Rick