Link Controls Problem

Question

I am using RoboHelp HTML X5.0.2 and Word 2003 on Windows XP
platform. Topics are created in Word 2003 and then link controls
(See Also, Related Topics, Keyword Search) added in the WYSIWYG
editor. Everything works fine until a topic is subsequently edited
in Word 2003 after which all the link controls "disappear". The
controls still show up in the WYSIWYG editor but will not work
until I re-do the links. I am in the early stages of a huge project
and am testing various options to see how future changes can be
managed. The odd thing is that the first time I tried the procedure
on a topic with Related Topics link I saw a large red "X" in Word
and a topic with a Keyword Search link appeared to be unaffected.
This makes me wonder if there is a setting in Word which can be
adjusted to prevent this problem. Has anyone else encountered this
issue? Does anyone have any suggestions?

Answer 1

Hi Rick,
Actually your questions is quite reasonable but I just spent
a considerable amount of time explaining how I came to be using
this method when everything "disappeared" aos I will have to start
over!
Currently, our reference and training documentation (which is
created and maintained in Lotus Notes) is provided to our clients
in the form of multiple printed binders. The goal is to now provide
all this documentation on a single CD. Since the software we are
documenting runs on a Unix platform and our clients have a wide
mixture of computing environments, WebHelp seems like the best
output format.
The easiest means of exporting the documents from Notes is as
PDF’s and since RoboHelp can import PDF’s it seemed
like the best tool for the job. However, when the documents are
imported into RoboHelp everything is fine except for the tables.
Unfortunately, all of our screen prints are in table format and all
of the spacing is stripped in the tables which makes the screen
prints unreadable and useless. (We are talking about hundreds of
documents and probably thousands of screen prints!) The problem
seems to lie with the conversion process from PDF to HTML as I
tried various other conversion tools and all had the same results.
My first solution was to bring the PDF documents into
RoboHelp as baggage files. Although a fairly tedious and
time-consuming process, it seemed like the answer but there are a
couple of major drawbacks. First of all, linking cannot be done at
the document level to cross reference between reference and how-to
documents. (I was able to work around this to some extent by
creating navigation topics for each software module which could be
linked to each other to provide linking at a “group”
level.) But the biggest deficiency is the inability to do full-text
searches which would be a major advantage of changing to the
electronic format.
At this point, since I already had exported the documents as
PDF’s, I considered using Adobe Acrobat instead of RoboHelp
but this did not turn out to be a workable solution.
So, I decided to return to RoboHelp using a different method
of getting the documents out of Notes. Notes can export documents
to RTF format but it means opening each document individually
(whereas multiple documents can be exported to PDF from a
“View” without opening each document). I tried various
methods including opening the RTF document in Word and saving as
HTML (formatting got messed up), opening the RTF document in Word,
saving as DOC and importing into RoboHelp (way too cumbersome a
process when each document is separate and even using RoboHelp for
Word to import the RTF documents directly (didn’t like it
– sorry – and also had formatting issues).
Finally, I devised a method of creating the topics (in
RobobHelp TOC) using Word 2003. I would then copy the contents of
the Notes document, paste into the Word topic and save it. (I did
try pasting contents directly into WYSIWYG editor but all
formatting was lost – which is why I am using Word!!!)
Although that may sound tedious, time consuming and cumbersome, it
actually took about the same amount of time as using the baggage
file method and, more importantly, it worked great! Topics look
fine, full-text searches work and links can be placed on individual
documents for cross referencing – which of course needs to be
done in the WYSIWYG editor.
Before proceeding too far, I decided to test what would
happen in the future when documents need to be replaced with
updated versions. And that brings us to my current problem. If a
document containing link controls is edited in Word, the link
controls added in WYSIWYG will no longer function. It seems like
the only way to fix this is to re-open the topic in the WYSIWYG
editor, actually re-do at least one of the links and then re-save
the topic.
Sorry for this lengthy response but perhaps you will have a
better understanding of why I am experiencing the problem. I am
open to suggestions if anyone knows of a better approach to this
project.
Thanks.