H&M 6+ stops converting - to _ so rolling back to 5

[Rocky Kimmons]

"In previous versions of Help & Manual dashes (-) in topic IDs were converted to underscores in the HTML file names generated from the IDs in HTML-based export formats. This was not necessary, since dashes are actually allowed in HTML file names.
Dashes are now left unchanged when topic IDs are converted to HTML file names. You may need to change calls and links to your output files accordingly when you re-publish old projects with Help & Manual 6 and later."

Since H&M 6+ stopped converting dashes to underscores, we cannot publish in versions 6+ and will have to roll back to 5 indefinitely.

Why? Because we have hundreds of topics and we're not going to go through all of them and update them and destroy the links between them.

Why is it a problem? Because the software we document has a built-in Help reference to the H&M output that won't match up now that all of the dashes aren't being converted. We aren't going through those hundreds of links to update them either.

We are forced to roll back to 5 indefinitely, unless there is some process that will update our topics for us.

[Tim Green]

Hi Rocky,

This is an unfortunate gotcha. I can understand how having a large number of external links in this case could be a show-stopper here. We're looking into possible solutions and I'll get back to you here when we've discussed it.

[Tim Green]

Hi Rocky,

At the moment we can't offer you an automated solution for this. However, it is quite possible to convert the references in your project globally so that all your topic ID hyphens are converted to underscores, along with all the references. This needs to be done on the source code of the project in the uncompressed format (HMXP). You need a multi-level regex-based GREP program for this like PowerGREP, that will first search, for example, for the href= reference inside a link tag and then replace everything you want to replace within the href= reference:

Code: Select all

<link displaytype="text" defaultstyle="true" type="topiclink" href="HM_Ribbon-View-Options-Shortcuts" styleclass="Body Text" translate="true">Program Options</link>

This needs to be done for all references within the TOC files and all the topic files and also the main project file. If you like you could mail us your project at support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @) and we could do it for you. It's quite quick and simple if you already know how, and would probably be the best solution for you at the moment.

[Rocky Kimmons]

I appreciate the help on this. I did have to update a dozen or so anchor references, but otherwise it appears that your conversion was successful. Thank you.

[Tim Green]

I appreciate the help on this. I did have to update a dozen or so anchor references, but otherwise it appears that your conversion was successful. Thank you.

That's possible. I didn't check for anchors, just topic links, image hotspots (there was only one image that had them) and snippets (there weren't any).