Text formatting migration issues from Robohelp X5 RTF files

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T-Kern - Writer
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Joined: Sat Nov 16, 2019 1:12 am

Text formatting migration issues from Robohelp X5 RTF files

Unread post by T-Kern - Writer »

As noted in my other posting, I am in the midst of contemplating a big jump from a large Robohelp X5 CHM project over to H&M. I have done my due diligence, to some degree, before making this posting. I am doing a HPJ file import.

1) Can I assume that build tags are not imported from the RTF files?

2) The big problem I am encountering is that bullets, numbered lists and overall paragraph indentations are not handled well. I do fully realize that these files are coming from Word 2000 + Robohelp X5 so there may be issues compared to what other users may encounter when sourcing from newer versions of Word + RTF files. The issue at hand is that I have quite a lot of files, decades of writing, which would have to be hand modified, paragraph by paragraph, if I were to import it through H&M in this manner. I have "simulated" myself hand updating these files but just one numbered paragraph takes quite a bit of work since I first have to undo the current formatting before I get a clean pagragraph to then reformat in HTML. While I am not looking for miracles, is there any chance that a few example .rtf files could be reviewed to see if the HPJ/RTF importer could be tweaked? Robohelp 2019 understands its older files quite well so it doesn't have any issues fixing up any formatting issues with the RTF files.

Thank you for the consideration of my comments and issues.
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Tim Green
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Re: Text formatting migration issues from Robohelp X5 RTF fi

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi T-Kern,

Yes, sorry, build tags aren't imported from RTF. The main supported RoboHelp import format is RoboHelp for HTML. However, bullets, lists etc. should import correctly. One first thing you could try would be to re-save a couple of the RTFs with a current version of Word. Help+Manual only understands Word RTF well, and other flavors can and will trip it up and even make it gag.

If you continue to have problems please do send us a couple of sample RTFs at support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @). We are constantly tweaking the importers and things like this are frequently easy to fix. Since RTFs are so bloated please do pack them in a zip and provide a download link rather than an attachment if necessary. The free Firefox Send service is excellent for this and works with all browsers:

https://send.firefox.com/
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
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