Robohelp 9 does not generate table headers

Question

Hi all,
the new table style mapping works, but is of no worth for me if Robohelp is not able to generate table headers in the Word output. Having headers in Word is also a prerequisite for the first line to repeat on each new page.
Is there a way to output the first line as a header?

Answer 1

Hi,
I can partially confirm that. HTML does have the concept of table headers, captions, footers and content. When using a table that is set up correctly, most browsers will render the table header on every printed page:
<table>
     <thead>
          <tr><th>First heading</th><th>Second heading</th></tr>
     </thead>
     <tbody>
          <tr><td>Value</td><td>Value</td></td>
     <tbody>
</table> 
RoboHelp does not use such tables. You can manually create these tables in HTML mode. When converting that to Word, the table headings are correctly converted to a Word table heading. In my default Word template, these headers correctly repeat after every pagebreak. But when you switch to Design view, RoboHelp then removes the structure information. The above table will be recreated as: 
<table>
  <tr><th>First heading</th><th>Second heading</th></tr>
  <tr><td>Value</td><td>Value</td></td>
</table> 
This table will not have it's first row set as a header in Word. 
As to what to do, I can think of two options:
  - You can write a script to quickly transform the tables in your project to have a table structure that works for printed documentation. Since RoboHelp will reset your tables, you will need to execute this script every time you want to generate your Word output. Also, because the structure of the tables will be changed, you probably need to amend your css. (The first table row uses th instead of td.)
  - Personally, I use default RoboHelp tables and I use the macro Peter mentioned. Peter's site contains several macro's that will greatly improve the quality of the RoboHelp Word output.
Greet, 
Willam