Robo 8 and DocBook

Question

Ok who is the expert on converting RoboHelp 8 HTML project to DocBook then using xsltproc and xhtml/docbook.xsl to convert to html files and using the css stylesheet file used for project in RH8 as the styles to be displayed in converted html files. I have successfully converted help project to docbook and used xsltproc and the doxbook.xsl (and other imported xsl files) in docbook-xsl-1.75.2\xhtml to convert to html. I had to add a line in docbook.xsl to provide a link to my css file in final html output. The problem is that formatting does not look the same in the generated html output. I assume because docbook.xsl is not reading all the styles in the original RH8 project source html files.
Customer wants delivery in DocBook xml output so they can convert to various formats using xslt processor. Anybody else dealt with similar issue. Would like generated html output from xslt to look like a webhelp application with same styles I started with in RH8.

Answer 1

Hi Jebzoober,
Yesterday afternoon we quit trying. Our developer believes the complexity is not worth the work, and he can work in the files himself (one of the goals) more easily if we keep the document in DocBook format. We agreed, knowing that single-sourcing does not save a lot of writer work given the differences the between our Windows & Linux application versions.
The developer used his XML and coding skills to fix the headers and broken links. His XML skills do not extend to DocBook stylesheet knowledge, and like your situation, his xsltproc did not fix the format issues. If we were to keep the docs in RH, he would have to fix the output after each generation.  He’s now working on adding David Cramer’s WebHelp-like styles to DocBook output (see online "david cramer" "webhelp" 2003).
Neil Perlin replied  to my questions - he's a consultant at  http://hyperword.blogspot.com/- and notes that as far as he knows, the RH XML module was not documented by the eHelp developers before they left Macromedia, and he knows of no other information about what's going on under the RH XML hood.
Direct RH support is unavailable to us right now – someone ordered the wrong product so we can’t register. I called support anyway, using our previous registration. They put me on hold for an hour, and I finally hung up.
If you need any more resource links, I did a lot of research on this. I also have questions out to other experts as well as RH support. If I learn any more, I'll post. Good luck, and if you do find the answer, would you please post. The day may yet come to switch back.