Cannot Control Image Position in RoboHelp When Linking To FM Files

Question

We are using TCS 3.5 on Windows XP Pro. It has taken a lot of work to get our mapping from FM to RH to work correctly, and we now remain with one outstanding task that I cannot figure out: controlling the position of images in the RoboHelp output.
The images appear arbitrarily justified left, center, or right in RoboHelp itself and in help outputs. I should also add that this is happening with both structured and unstructured FM files. Typically, the output I'm working with is WebHelp or WebHelp Pro.
I've turned to the "Object Properties" and "Anchored Frame" pods in FM looking for settings that might be contributing to this behavior, but have not found anything that appears to connect settings there with the image behavior in RH. In the structured FM files, I had some suspicions that complex if/else conditions controlling image position might somehow be contributing to this problem. But the conversion settings in RH don't allow those EDD rules to carry over.
I also turned to the "Conversion Settings" in RH and played with some of the options for "Images" there, unticking or ticking "Use Distiller to Generate Images" and "Do Not Regenerate Images."
Our online help now looks pretty clean, since all the styles are mapped, with the exception being these wonky images everywhere.
I would certainly like to determine the root cause of this behavior, because we're using this FM>RH workflow to create online help systems for hundreds of legacy FM documents that encompass thousands of such images. I want to fix this in the mapping and not touch the original images, if possible
However, if anyone has the answer regarding the best practice for generally controlling image behavior in structutured and unstructured FM to RH, I would be eager to learn these details as well.
Thanks in advance,
Douglas

Answer 1

I believe it is. And I have had the same problem with tables.
I made multiple posts about the images trying to describe it in different ways, but all I got were crickets chirping on the forums. I finally called Adobe technical support. Their initial reaction was to show me how image mapping did work correctly with freshly minted FM files and RH project. I had to draw them back into real world scenarios by giving them my source files to recreate the issue. At this point they admitted something was amiss, and one rep even slipped and said it was a “known issue.” They promised to get back to me with a resolution. But despite 4 additional attempts contacting them, and  they now just ignore my e-mails.
I am very disappointed in the way Adobe has handled this matter, both from a development and a support standpoint. It would do all of us users a world of good if they admitted these flaws in their release notes, and offered possible workarounds. Maybe there is no workaround, in which case it explains why they don’t admit it? But beyond poor software development and bug fixes, I think it’s sad that they don’t follow up on support.
Adobe seems to assume that tables and images are going to carry over from FM to RH correctly, so you get no fine tune controls, like you do for character and paragraph mapping, and I think this is the crux of the problem.
I got those tables working in my projects just by dumb luck, but I still have no control over them. The images…they still represent a huge problem for our company. We invested an enormous amount of resources into a RH migration, hoping to continue to use FM. But now we have issues with no apparent resolution. It’s making us regret our decision and reconsider our initial considerations to move to MadCap Flare and/or a component content-management system.
If you have any luck making headway with the issue, I would love to know more.