Migrating a project from Front Page to Help Manual V6

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Elizabeth Arcos
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Joined: Tue Jan 14, 2014 10:31 pm

Migrating a project from Front Page to Help Manual V6

Unread post by Elizabeth Arcos »

Dear Tim Green

Please your help with the following problem.
I want to migrate a project manuals Front to Help Manual. Reviewing xml files, apparently the names of the styles were removed and now they are separate by table style, font style, paragraph style and I need to take the original style.
I look forward to your comments.
Thank you for your help.
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Tim Green
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Location: Bruehl, Germany
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Re: Migrating a project from Front Page to Help Manual V6

Unread post by Tim Green »

When you import from HTML it is not possible to map all the different CSS style options directly to the text and paragraph styles used in the Help & Manual editor. Because of this, the CSS formatting is imported, but it is applied as inline formatting, the same as manual formatting applied without styles in the editor.

You can improve the import to a certain extent by adjusting the HTML import settings, but you will also have to do some manual work initially.

These are the things you can do to get the best possible performance:

How to import the HTML files
  1. Organize your HTML files in a folder tree matching the structure you want for your table of contents. Chapters will be created for folders and sub-folders.
  2. Then select New Project and the option for importing data from HTML and text files.
  3. Choose a folder, name etc. for the new project, then click on the "Continue with Options" button a the bottom of the dialog.
  4. In the next dialog you will select the files to import (generally all of them) and the options for importing the HTML source code and splitting the HTML file contents into header and body. Generally you need to select the TITLE tag for the header and everything else for the body. However, have a look at the source code of a couple of your HTML topic files -- depending on how you designed your templates you may be able to get better results.
    Dealing with styles after importing
When you import from HTML all the formatting is applied inline, without style names. The result is the same as applying formatting manually, without using styles. You will need to re-create your styles by selecting text and paragraphs and using the Styles > Create Style from Selection function in the Write tab.

After that you may be able to automate the application of your styles to matching text to a certain extent with the Styles > Replace Styles function. However, this is limited to a certain extent because you must search and replace for text formatting and paragraph formatting attributes separately.

First you want to set up your Normal style. The bold Normal+ display is because the formatting is initially imported as inline (i.e. manual) formatting, and that has precedence over any style definition.

This is a global operation, so make a backup before you begin.

PART ONE: UPDATING THE NORMAL STYLE

1) First choose a paragraph as a model for the Normal style that you want to have as your standard for the entire project. It should be a paragraph with uniform formatting, without any sub-text formatted in a different way. Use Styles > Create Style from Selection to update the definition of Normal to the attributes of this style.

2) Then click in the paragraph and select Styles - Replace Styles.

You are now going to need to perform two replacement operations, one for the text attributes and one for the paragraph attributes.

3) Before proceeding, make sure that there are no other paragraphs formatted as Normal that you may want to turn into a different style. If there are, you will need to create new styles for them and apply them before proceeding. You may have to do this manually, because searching for just text attributes and just paragraph attributes on their own, without a style name, is not as reliable as paragraphs tagged with a style name.

4) Select the Font Styles option at the top, and make sure the "Normal" is selected in the Format/Style box at the top on both sides, i.e. for both search and replace. Change ALL the inline formatting options on the left to "(Any)", because we want to change all paragraphs formatted as Normal. On the right side, select "Remove except Bold/Italic/Underline/Color". This will leave manual formatting for these options unchanged, which is normally what you want (you can also remove all inline formatting if you want). Then click on Replace Styles to perform the replacement.

5) Now switch to Paragraph Styles at the top and select Normal in the Style box at the top on both the left and right. Here too, change all the settings in the left column to "(Any)", and in the right column select "Remove inline formatting".

6) Perform the replacement

Now all the Normal paragraphs in the entire project are under the control of your new version of Normal.

PART 2: OTHER NAMED STYLES

You can use the same procedure to apply the paragraphs with the imported styles with red names. First create a style with exactly the same name using one of the paragraphs as a model. Then use Replace Styles to remove the inline formatting for the font and paragraph attributes and keep just the style name.

IMPORTANT: Sometimes the Replace Styles dialog cannot find the stored name of the imported paragraph style, but it is almost always really there if there was one. Just enter the name of the style manually in the left selector box at the top, then it will work if the style was there in the HTML.

For detailed instructions see the chapter More Advanced Procedures > Replacing Formatting and Styles in the help.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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