RH 8 for Word losing WYSIWYG images

Question

Hi everyone,
I have been using RoboHelp since its BlueSky Software days to develop documentation as consultant for a leading 3D modeling and rendering application. My last project was done with RH6 using Word 2003 on a 32 bit  XP machine.
For the next round, I suggested upgrading to RH8 (in fact, I am going to purchase my own license instead of using a company's license), so I installed the 30 days demo on my week-old machine - Vista 64 bit, 8 cores, 12GB RAM, Office 2007, all that jazz.
I copied the previous project one-to-one over to the new machine, opened it successfully and performed a test compilation from the existing documents without resaving anything. As far as I could tell, everything went ok, the final CHM output was identical to the output of RH6.
So I started doing minor edits like changing the version number of the product and a couple of links. I saved the document containing the start page (got saved to DOC file in compatibility mode as expected and without any problems) and compiled again. This time, the two images (banner and a kind of splash screen found on the start page) were missing.
A look at the Images list in RH showed that they were indeed missing from the project, albeit in the bitmaps folder defined for the project. For obvious reasons, all images in the project are shown as WYSIWYG and not TrueCode. So I double-clicked one of the two missing images and the bitmap dialog did not know the file name of the image embedded in the Word document! So I selected the file name again, checked TrueCode, resaved the document and the image appeared on the Images list. Switched back to WYSIWYG, resaved the document and it was gone again.
To make sure I was not dreaming, I started a new empty project, added one of the built in button bitmaps to it, saved the document (this time a native DOCX file) and got the same problem - no image in compiled CHM, no image on the Images list. Switched to TrueCode and it appeared again. A look at the intermediate HTML files showed of course that the image was not exported. A look at the intermediate RTF format using Notepad showed the file name in curly brackets where it should have been, so it looks like there was some miscommunication between RH8 and Word.
To make sure this was not a Word 2007 issue, I installed Word 2003, switched RH8 to use that and tried again working with my existing project, but got exactly the same results - TrueCode works, WYSIWYG appears to get forgotten. In fact, it turned out that about half of the over 1000 images used in the project were missing after a while as the documents containing them got resaved. Those that were left either belonged to files that were not resaved yet, or happened to be left as TrueCode due to lower visual importance.
Sinced most of my images in the source are WYSIWYG, one would possibly propose to switch them all to TrueCode. This would not work though (I tried, so I know ) - for all images that were automatically converted to TrueCode, I got a {bmc } entry with no file name whatsoever. (Thankfully I had a full backup of the project ready to get copied over to restore the mess, otherwise I wouldn't have figured out which entry was what image). This was to be expected, because any attempt to open a source DOC file and double-click an image leads to an empty file name, so RH8 is unable to see what was saved in the file by RH6.
So at this point I have 25 days of evaluation time before I either
1. Find a solution to this problem and spend the dough on a license
2. Dust off my old single core machine and do another round of RH6 development (I don't look forward to this).
On a side note, I am getting the error opening the compiled CHM from the compiler dialog's View button reported in another discussion when compiling the existing project, but NOT when compiling a newly created one. Oh, and my "smart quotes" replacement is completely disabled.
Any assistance in this matter would be really appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this issue has been resolved, but I'll add my two cents.
Based on your post, several issues are involved: RH upgrade and Word upgrade.
From my experience:
MS Word 2007 is not completely 2003 compatible - even though it says so.
The save as rtf from Word vs the save as rtf from RH differ. I believe RH uses its own save as rtf. File size of the rtf files differ drastically.
Putting an image directly into the word doc causes problems in one form or another, so you should always use the RH menus to insert your images.
When an image is inserted into a word doc, if you don't insert it correctly, a copy of Paint is also inserted behind the scenes tied to the image so that you can edit the image directly in the doc. This not only makes the doc file huge, it may be causing the problems you are seeing as I am not sure how RH deals with an image tied to Paint. To determine if you image is tied to Paint, right-click the image and see if the edit image option is available because that means it is tied to Paint.
There is something you could try. Export your RH6 project into a doc that has the images in it. Then create a new project and import the doc. Specify in the conversion of this doc to create images. That may fix the broken links you are seeing in true code. (As a side note, working in true code will increase your computer's performance.) Letting RH convert the images to bmp files should also automatically insert the true code {bmc... etc.) Note that images are converted in the order that they appear in your doc, i.e., first image will be called image001.bmp and so on. Yes, this will be confusing. At some point you may want to rename the image file to something meaningful to you and change the corresponding image in the bmc in your doc file.
If that doesn't work, if I were you, I would go through the doc and one by one save each image with a name you understand, then immediately insert the image using the RH menu and then delete the WYSIWYG image. Remember to save the images as bmp files. During the compile, RH converts these images to GIFs behind the scenes so your output file is smaller. As daunting as this sounds, you won't regret this. Your doc will open faster and be smaller making it easier to manipulate, and you can edit or replace the bmp file and the new image will appear when you recompile.
Note: if you choose to use either of the above suggestions, you may need to use RH imaging tool to resize your pix. The bmp image should always be the size you want it to appear in your output. In Word and WYSIWYG, people have a tendency to insert an image and resize it for printing and this does not convert well.
Another thing you may want to consider is saving the doc using the Word 2007 default. As you mentioned, when you created a test project, the file was a docx and not doc.