Linking word documents and auto-updating TOCs?

Hi, all!
I know InDesign a bit, but am about to embark on a project that I could use some help on. Im compiling all the different writing Ive done in the past four years into a little ebook. There are about 50 different essays/articles, each under four categories in the table of contents. Many need editing, and the ebook will require lots of moving things around and editing.
So, is it possible to link Word documents like as you can do with images? I would like to have InDesign link to all the different word documents that comprise different essays, etc, so I can edit individual essays from Word and have them auto-update within InDesign. Also, is there a similar thing I can do with the table of contents, where it will automatically update the page number of a given entry when I rearrange it? These two things would save me much time!
Thank you!
Alec

As much as you think you want to auto-update the Word documents, you don't.
Yes, there is a way to link those Word files, but you will lose all formatting applied in ID each time you do update the linked files.
Why don't you just make those changes in InDesign?
Next, yes, you can create a TOC that will update page numbers automatically when the document(s) change.
That is no problem.

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RH9 - Can not create ANY links in linked Word documents ;-(

Ok, this does not make sense:
- From RH9, create a fresh empty project
- Create two word files "Topic1.docx" and "Topic2.docx"
- Put "Link Here" in each document
- Save the documents
- From Project Manager, Project Files, link both documents, generate, update all, etc.
- Now create hyperlinks in each topic, pointing to the other topic using default topic editor in RH9
- Save All and Generate the WebHelp project and test the links are there and work.
- Now open and edit both word documents in word. Add some text to each and save
- In RH9 Project Manager, Project files, Update All and open the topics in RH9 default editor
Walla, the full text is there, the LINKS are gone. Actually, I understand that this is how it works, but the BIG problem is that links to bookmarks, other topics, links to outside resources created in RH9 Default Editor cannot be preserved when the related/linked document is edited in Word. AND, you cannot create ANY of these links in the Word documents. So, you have a help system that has really nice update features when an author makes a change to a document, but NO LINKS. Updating a linked document will DELETE ANY changes made within the RH9 Default Editor.
Does this make any sense? Has my brain fallen down? Is there another workflow option?
Thanks for any help
Lyle
Hummmmm, NO POPUPs, mini TOCs or See Also Keywords, Link Controls, etc. etc. etc.

I have been observing this thread and wanted to just chip in to remove some misnomers,
1. If you create any hyperlink from any MS Word document (say Doc1) to another MS Word document (say Doc2) and you import the original document (Doc1) then it brings its reference (that is the word document Doc2) as baggage in the RoboHelp project and the hyperlink is not created to the html file generated for the word document Doc2 (linked or imported seprately).
thus if you click the hyperlink in RoboHelp it should open the word document Doc 2 (that was brought into the project as baggage)
2. If word "conversion setting" alone are modified (like the settings “convert references to hyperlinks”) then at times the mapping fails to work, in such scenarios just go to the conversion settings dialog of FrameMaker and modify multiple “other settings” (it won’t impact your word conversion mapping.) Now any conversion settings applied for word will work.
Hence the “convert references to hyperlinks” is working but you need to update any FrameMaker conversion settings to get it working
@ Lyle – as now the flow must be clearer so I would give you a suggestion to merge all the word documents that you want to work with and use cross-references to places you want to have hyperlinks and use the option to “convert references to hyperlinks” in RoboHelp.and keep all the authoring in word document so that nothing is lost on update.
NB – There is a method to create intra document cross references in MS Word
In FrameMaker the concept of book gives it a sense of collection and thus cross references across FM documents inside a book are converted easily but in Word there is no way to group word documents and thus it is not possible to convert any spatial hyperlinks from one document to another.
Hope this helps
Ashish

Losing hyperlinks when linking word documents

We use RoboHelp version 9.0
Project description
We have a Parent project with 7 child projects. Each child project has, on an average, 40 files.
The files in each child project are linked to word documents. Every time we have updates to content, we update the word file and click Update in RH project.
All the child projects are merged in the parent project via TOC.
On completion of updates in the individual projects, we generate the individual projects and then generate the parent project for final output.
Our project structure is like this, where each circle represents a folder.
The issue
The issue we face is about See also links.
Each word file in almost all projects has “See also” topics without links in the word document. However, we hyperlink them with .htm files (within the child project and between child projects) in RH.
Because the links are set in RH and the content updates are made in linked word files, whenever we modify the word files and update them in RH, the links are lost. We need to manually go to each file in RH and re-hyperlink them. Although we select the “Preserve modifications to this file” before we save in RH, the links are still lost.
In addition to losing the hyperlinks, a duplicate file gets created for each file in backend. We have to manually delete each file.
My questions
Are we doing something incorrect in this process? Losing links and file duplication - is this because of incorrect folder structure? Is there a way we can prevent it? We tried linking See also topics in word files itself, but since the hyperlinks have an absolute path and not relative path, we lose the links if the project is placed in another computer.
The total count of files in the complete project is around 500. We tried having a single project rather than merged projects. But we are not sure if we can multi-author a single project. We use SVN as a source control tool and apparently RH does not support it.
3. Is linking the word files the best practice? My organization insists on maintaining word documents.

According to this, Rh is compatible with SVN.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/robohelp/articles/robohelp_subversion.html
See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips
@petergrainge

How do I generate a Word document and a PDF from Help files?

Hi,
I am new to RoboHelp HTML, and am using version 8. I updated some Help files, and now I want to generate output. Here are my questions/ or the process I used:
To compile the help, I clicked Generate Primary Layout. Is this correct? I noticed that the date stamp on the xpj file has not changed. The date is still from many months ago. (Why is that? Should it show a recent update date?) However, the files that I updated do reflect the dates when I made the updates. These include art files, an hhp, and htm, js, ldb, pss, cpd files.
To generate a pdf, I clicked Generate PDF. I was not able to generate the PDF at first, but then, I enabled macros in Word 2007 (Trust Center Settings > Enable all macros...and clicked the checkbox, Trust access to the VBA project object model), and clicked Generate PDF. At the end of the generation, I got this error in Word: Microsoft Office Word has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. The info you were working on might be lost. Word can try to recover it for you. I closed the dialog and Word generated several blank documents. Microsoft Office Diagnostics was run and found one problem and corrected it. Despite the error message, a pdf was generated. (If you could give me any insight on why I got the error messages, that could be helpful to know).
How do I generate a Word document?
Thank you!
Erin

Welcome to our community
Note that RoboHelp is capable of creating a variety of layouts. WebHelp, FlashHelp, AIR Help, Microsoft HTML Help, JavaHelp, Oracle Help, ePub and more.
Any of these layouts may be nominated as the Primary layout. So when you generate the Primary layout, you get whatever has been configured as the Primary layout.
Only certain actions will result in a change to the .XPJ file. The actions are indicative of major changes to the project. So I wouldn't fret the fact that the date time stamp wasn't updated.
Indeed the Printed Documentation Single Source Layout recipe is what you use to create PDF. Generally what happens is that RoboHelp creates a Microsoft Word document as an intermediate file type, then creates the PDF from that. As you might imagine, there are a host of things that can go wrong during the process. I might suggest that you first get a Word document to generate cleanly. Then once you do that, focus on PDF. I know that I typically gen a Word document and stop there. I just open Word and use Word to create the PDF.
If you look at the properties for the Printed Documentation Single Source Layout recipe (View > Pods > Single Source Layouts then right-click the Printed Documentation layout and choose Properties) you will see that PDF, Word or both are options at the top of the dialog.
Hopefully that gives you a nudge in the right direction.
My fellow Adobe Community Expert Peter Grainge has excellent info on Printed Documentation on his site at Grainge.org. Click the link below for that.
Click here to visit Peter's site
Cheers... Rick
Helpful and Handy Links
RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form
Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7 or 8 moments from now - $24.95!
Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training
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How can I have a topic name different than the filename of a linked Word document?

I've encountered multiple issues with linking to Word files ...here's another one: If a Word document is entitled Feature_ABC, then upon generating the HTM after linking it, the HTM's filename and topic name are both Feature_ABC. As underscores are ugly in topic names and features can be renamed, I would hope that I could rename the topic to be different than the filename.
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Because the topic name is shown in the Search panel and browser tabs, it will be a little ugly and may even be confusing. It is possible to edit the HTML directly, but then the HTML is overwritten each time the Word documents are update and the great advantage of using linked documents is lost.
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Can I apply one .css stylesheet to all of my linked word documents inside my RoboHelp8 HTML project?

Hello all,
I am on my fourthRoboHelp8 HTML project, after the other three crashed. I am a technical writer constructing my companies Policy and Procedures Guide. I am only 142 (word documents) and 9 (RoboHelp topics) into my project and there will be plenty more to come. I recently took Kevin Siegel's RoboHelp8 class where I determined that it would be best if I link all of my word documents inside of the Project Manager becuase I will be constantly updating these documents. I've searched around the Adobe Forums, talked to Kevin, and talked to my IT Department, but I cannot seem to find an answer for my problem.
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Thank you,
Roxxanne

When a word document is imported into RoboHelp project, RoboHelp generates a separate stylesheet for each word document as each word document may have its own formatting styles. In a generic scenario, word documents may be brought from different sources and may have different styling. Hence, RoboHelp allows users to preserve different styling through sepearate stylesheets.
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Mayank

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Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) samedi 1 octobre 2011 18:00:23
iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0
My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>
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Linking word documents and auto-updating TOCs?

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