Importing from CHM

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Ty Griffin
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Joined: Thu Nov 14, 2019 6:08 pm

Importing from CHM

Unread post by Ty Griffin »

Warning: I'm a very new user of H+M, don't know my way around very well.

When I import a new project from a CHM file, pretty much everything in the new project and newly-generated output is as expected, with two exceptions:

1. All my links are dead. They format correctly (blue underline), but they don't work. These are simple links to in-document topics.

2. There are five/six/seven/eight empty anchor symbols at the top of each topic.

Are these issues something I can fix by tweaking import settings (I didn't see anything), or any other means?

Thanks.
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Tim Green
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Re: Importing from CHM

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Ty,

Normally, links within CHM documents should work after importing. Try double-clicking on them to open the link editing dialog, so that you can see what they are pointing to.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Ty Griffin
Posts: 8
Joined: Thu Nov 14, 2019 6:08 pm

Re: Importing from CHM

Unread post by Ty Griffin »

Thanks Tim. I should have thought of that. Here's what shows when copying the link address:

javascript:TL_276677.HHClick()

javascript:RT_5948.HHClick()
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Re: Importing from CHM

Unread post by Tim Green »

Ty Griffin wrote:javascript:TL_276677.HHClick()
javascript:RT_5948.HHClick()
And that's the problem. The tool that created your CHM didn't use normal topic links, which would simply contain the html filename of the topic to be opened. Instead, it used its own scripted solution, which Help+Manual's importer unfortunately can't know anything about, so it can't resolve them.

From the reference I'm afraid it goes further here: It looks as though the tool was probably originally created to generate the even older WinHelp HLP format, using WinHelp links. And when the authors upgraded it to produce CHM files they solved the problem by scripting the links. This would be typical of a tool using Word files as its source -- WinHelp's source files were Word RTF files. :?
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Ty Griffin
Posts: 8
Joined: Thu Nov 14, 2019 6:08 pm

Re: Importing from CHM

Unread post by Ty Griffin »

Okay, thanks Tim, I understand.

Since I cannot possibly do without the links in existing documents, and all the CHMs I can generate will have the same problem, I'm setting "CHM as best import format" aside for now.

Next up was importing from separate HMTL files. So I tried that and the links all failed there also, but for a different reason. In this case, the name of the topic was "This Is The Topic Name" but the embedded link to it was "thisisthetopicname.html." Obviously, H+M can't be expected to figure out that that link goes to that topic. Doc-to-Help is compressing the title name to delete spaces and punctuation and thereby causing the problem. Right? (Also, predictably, I got no TOC but just an alphabetical list of topics. Again, it's not reasonable to expect H+M to figure out D2H's TOC structure.)

So it's on to RTF. And things look good! With a few minor formatting differences which I will presumably be able to figure out as I gain experience with H+M, the H+M version of NetHelp output is identical to the Doc-to-Help-generated NetHelp output. Tables intact, formatting good, links working. Great!

Except for one thing: index entries.

I can see them in the RTF, but they are not coming through to the H+M project. They are normally-formatted Word index entries--i.e., {xe "Entry"} in hidden text as a Word field.

Any ideas?
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