Creation of Topics in RoboHelp 7

Hi,
I am trying to generate Help file out of word document through robohelp 7.0. The problem is the topics do not get separated as per headings. Like say for example, the heading style ( outlining level ) goes like this:
Level 1
     Level 2
          Level 3
Level 1
     Level 2
          Level 3..so on ..
When I import the document, I check options to create different topics based on Headings, I check heading 1 , 2 and 3. However, after generating the final output, the first 3 levels in bold are organised correctly, however, the next level 1 Topic and topic levels thereafter are not separated into separate pages, it continues along with the Topic marked level 3 as a continous section.
Has anybody encountered this problem before. Or do i have to bookmark my topics ? Is there any setting that I need to do in Word or the tool ?
I am not sure about this, looking forward to more inputs on this.
Thanks,
Pallavi

Hi Pallavi.
Do you have your styles mapped correctly? Check out this link.
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Need help with New Topic in RoboHelp 7

I'm trying to pick up where someone else left off and am a little lost. I have a WebHelp project on a Sharepoint site. I have added a new topic which I can see in my file structure, but when I generate the project the new topic file does not show up. It must be something small I'm missing. Help!!

Welcome to our community
Did you add the topic to the Table of Contents structure or the Index? How are your users going to arrive at the topic?
Cheers... Rick
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Malformed topic error - RoboHelp 9

Hi,
After checking out every suggestion on dealing with this error with no luck (including Peter Grainge's print issues and every other posting on malformed topics), I am at a loss - any help/suggestions on a solution would be GREATLY appreciated.
I have three single source print layouts in my project - Administration Guide, Operations Guide, and Reference Guide. A few of the topics are common to several of these layouts. WebHelp compiles perfectly along with all three different TOCs.
The Administration Guide generates a printed document, which needs the usual formatting in Word, but all the topics generate. When I attempt to generate either the Operations or Reference Guide I get the malformed topic error message after about 10 topics - not always on the same topic. Here's the puzzling thing to me - the topics that hang are topics that generated just fine in the Administration Guide. Is this perhaps something to with my conditional build tags and the same topics being used for multiple layouts?
Print Wizard settings:
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I have tried using the Microsoft Word Template styles and the Stylesheet - default.css in turn with the same result.
I have been scouring the html code for weird leftovers from cutting and pasting topics from a previous Word doc (This project originated in Doc-To-Help, but as I had not created online Help previously, just a pdf output, I started a new project in RoboHelp and created each topic from scratch, but did cut and paste text from the Word doc. I thought perhaps there might be an issue with Word tables which are plentiful in this project, but the error starts with topics that have no tables in them.
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Many thanks in advance,
Sally

I encountered a Malformed Topic error message that I eventually resolved after trying many of the suggested resolutions.
Here's what I tried that did not resolve the problem:
Cleaned-up the HTML generated by the MS Word document <Word 2007>
Ensured my topic/filenames weren't too long
Removed tables
Eliminated all Conditional Build Tags
Deleted the 'offending' document
Confirmed Memory requirements/capacity (on my machine)
This did resolve the problem:
Resolved by reducing the size of large file(s) - (by breaking-up one large document into many documents)
Also of interest, the large document did contain many tables, which probably aggravated the condition (malformed topic)
The environment
I use RoboHelp Version 9.0.2
On a network
Also have a Local copy
Use Visual Source Safe
Have 351 Topics
Printed doc approx. 850 pages
Source docs are MS Word 2007
Use RH Style Sheet and applicable Word settings
I hope this info will help you determine which resolution is right for your situation!
Cara
Tech. Writer
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Linking to .hlp topics from RoboHelp HTML 6

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Any help is greatly appreciated, and please dumb down the
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Thanks,
Kelly

Hi Kelly and welcome to our community
Whether you may do this will depend on whether you are
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make sure your primary layout is configured for Microsoft HTML
Help. If it isn't, you won't see the option I'm about to point you
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Once you cross that hurdle, click inside a topic and choose
Insert > HTML Help Controls > WinHelp Topic...
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I'm creating a help system and user manual using RoboHelp 9. The whole thing depends very heavily upon the conditional build tags. (Some parts are online and others are only for the print version of the manual.)
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Never seen what you're describing - when you tag text in a topic with a CBT, it stays stuck to it - there's no auto generation of CBTs. When you create your help, you specify what to show & what to hide in your SSL layout recipe.

Regarding Navigation Flow of Topics in Robohelp 11

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Hi,
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Hi
I am using licienced version of Robohelp9.The problem I am facing is described below.
I am creating Robohelp project from a pdf file.Some topics in my pdf file spreads to one page and some to more than one page. If I generate a Robohelp project from it each page creates a new topic
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Please provide help

Which option are you selecting when you import? I just created a PDF with three topics, each starting with the Heading 1 style. Two topics were multi-page and one was single page.
I selected the first option and the in next screen I selected Style 1 to break the PDF into topics. I got three topics with the correct content.
See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips
@petergrainge

External Topics in RoboHelp HTML

Let's say I have BOOK1 and BOOK2.
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Jenn

When linking to an external topic, the topic is just that -
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But all is not lost - instead of linking to an external topic
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Managing topics in RoboHelp

Question - as I create new books with topics in them, do I always need to create these in the
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Also - do book topics need to be established as a folder within the Project Manager pod? Or
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Hi there
Yes and No and Yes. (How's that for an answer?)
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Multiple issues with See Also controls when importing topics (RoboHelp 9)

I was wondering if anyone has found workarounds to a very flaky area of RoboHelp...
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2) When the topics are imported and the project is built, the See Also control does not work as expected. In RoboHelp, right-clicking the See Also control and choosing See Also [] Properties... reveals that the options you previously set, such as 'Popup menu' or "If no topics are associated with any of the See Also keywords..." have been lost! So all those nasty Topics Found dialogs return when you build the help (instead of popups). If you have a See Also control placed in every topic for consistency, it will never grey out if the topic doesn't belong to any See Also keywords.
3) When the topics are imported and the project is built, the current topic's name appears in its own list of See Also topics, i.e. it self-references. So for example, if you are viewing topic A and click the See Also link, topics A, B, C and D are listed, instead of just B, C and D. However, when you create new See Also keywords in RoboHelp, assign topics, and build the help, they work correctly and do not show the calling topic's name.
I spent hours analysing the HTML code of files I am importing, and the code of brand new topics created in RoboHelp, and I can see no obvious differences apart from some -1/0/1 flags in the green Metadata section preceding the SeeAlso code. I even tried changing these flags in my import files to exactly match the flags of new topics that RoboHelp just built, but when importing they still don't work. Clearly RoboHelp stores crucial See Also information elsewhere in the project, but does not make this reliably transportable by adding it to the HTM files that it builds, despite the huge Metadata comment block.
Adobe needs to put a lot of work into making it possible to cleanly re-use files as content re-use is a very common, and often critical, requirement.

Hi there
After reading your post, I come away being unsure about your goal. Is the goal here to simply advise others as to what they may encounter using the See Also functionality? Or is your goal to advise Adobe about what you would like to see changed?
If your goal is to advise Adobe about what you would like to see changed, you need to visit the Wish Form at www.adobe.com/go/wish and file an official request. Otherwise, it just gives you a nice warm glow that you had your say here. But it won't have much of any effect on the product.
As far as any workarounds, I might suggest the following. You seem to be regularly creating a new projects and importing content. And if that's the case, I might suggest you create a template project that would already have these things in place so that as you add content, the expected keywords and links and whatnot are already in place. My thought is that this action would ease much of the frustration you are facing.
Cheers... Rick

Is there an easy way to create a searchable "Frequently Asked Questions" topic in a webhelp project?

Robohelp 8
Webhelp
Does Robohelp have a built in feature for FAQ creation?

Hi there
RoboHelp doesn't have a mechanism built in that monitors what has been asked and dynamically creates an FAQ for you (if tha'ts what you are asking).
So certainly any FAQ list will have to be constructed by you. Fortunately, RoboHelp does offer tools that will assist.
RoboHelp 8 offers what is called a "Mini TOC Placeholder" that might help. What you would do is to create a topic and insert the Questions followed by the Answers up and down the page. Then format each question as a Heading. (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. Generally I like using Heading 2.) Then insert the placeholder at the top of the topic and RoboHelp will construct a list of questions that has each question as a link pointing to its counterpart farther down the page.
If you aren't too keen on that approach you could also type your list of questions and create a dynamic HTML drop-down where each answer would expand and reveal itself as the user clicked the question.
Cheers... Rick
Helpful and Handy Links
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Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7, 8 or 9 within the day!
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Image Maps link not working in Acrobat 8 3D PDFs generated from RoboHelp 7

All of my hyperlinks work when I just generated my RoboHelp
project to PDF using RoboHelp 7 with the new Adobe Technical
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topics within the document didn't maintain from the image maps. I
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Sigh... and this is why no one like to work with newbies...
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How do I make a new topic have the same formatting as other topics in a project?

Hi,
I am using RH 8 for HTML. I am updating a preexisting project and am new to RH. When I create a new topic, how do I get the formatting (fonts, shading, etc.) from another topic? The old topics are formatted in a certain way. When I create a new topic, or even paste existing content from an old topic into it, it has different fonts and shading. Is this something I must do manually, or is there an automatic way? Either way, I could use some pointers.
I would past a screen capture here, but when I tried to do that, the formatting went away.
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Erin

Hi there
Probably it's just a matter of associating the correct CSS file.
Open both topics in RoboHelp.
Edit a topic where things look correct.
Click the CSS icon as shown below:
Click the image below for larger view
Now edit the errant topic.
Click the same icon and choose the CSS file you saw earlier.
Cheers... Rick
Helpful and Handy Links
RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form
Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7, 8 or 9 within the day!
Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training
SorcerStone Blog
RoboHelp eBooks

Robohelp HTML 8 - Generating files with apostrophe in file name

Before I start, I have read this thread
http://forums.adobe.com/message/1062904#1062904 and several others, yet I still have questions.
Previously I used Robohelp 5x, which worked perfectly. Our user manuals are in MS Word and each have several topics that have apostrophes in the topic name (that are necessary in the topic). Robohelp 5x would import the Word Document without issue and create HTML files that automatically replaced the apostrophe with an underscore. All references (Index, TOC, etc) to those files also automatically changed to underscore.
Fast Forward to Robohelp 8.0.2 (yes, I have the update). Even if I go into the options and make sure "Use Underscores in file names" is selected - it no longer replaces the apostrophe with an underscore (though it does replace the spaces with underscores).
Locally, when I generate the online help (WebHelp) and put it on our local webserver - it works just fine. Even with the apostrophes in the file names and references.
However, when the WebHelp files are hosted at our server hosting facility, any links within the Webhelp to files with an apostrophe result in a 404 error. I have searched and searched to see if there is some kind of server setting to allow these special characters to be recognized in the file name but have not had any luck.
Per the link at the beginning of this post, the issue in that thread was resolved by changing the file name of the HTML files. I attempted to change the file name of the HTML files that RoboHelp created. However as far as I can tell there is no way to do this within RoboHelp 8. If I attempt to do it outside of RoboHelp 8, I need to import all of the "new" HTML files and all references (Table of Contents, Index, etc) now show broken links and need to be re-linked to this new topic. This is not an option. I have 12 user manuals that are updated on a regular basis and the renaming\relinking process would take forever.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
-Noob

I was able to log into the server hosting facility and look at the html files themeslves.
It appears that at some point (between when I created them locally and now) all of the apostrophes in the file names were changed to "Æ". This blew my mind. And sure enough if I plug in the URL and replace the apostrophe with "Æ" the page shows up just fine.
From what I've been reading it looks like that may be related to the conversion from MS Word and "Smart Quotes". I'm looking into that now, but any help would still be great.
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Adding a Loading Animation to a Captivate movie for use in a RoboHelp Project?

Hello all:
I'm inserting SWFs (built in Captivate 5) into Robohelp topics (using RoboHelp 9, publishing to WebHelp Pro output). These topics hold only the SWFs, so I've published the SWFs to autoplay when opened.
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The best option is to break out the words because it gives you the most control. However, if the two words you want to glow are next to each other you can use the Sequence Text behavior.
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