HMXZ project from 6 or 7 has major problems when opened in 9

Discussions about Help+Manual 9

Moderators: Alexander Halser, Tim Green

Post Reply
Elissa Miller
Posts: 19
Joined: Wed Jul 31, 2013 7:23 pm

HMXZ project from 6 or 7 has major problems when opened in 9

Unread post by Elissa Miller »

Hi, helpful people:

From 2013 to 2020, I used H&M to create online help for my employer. I think the last version I used was 6 or 7. They recently found and sent me a correctly named HMXZ file. Unfortunately, when I open it in H+M 9, there's a lot of naming, hierarchical structure, and formatting that's not intact. For example, here's the top level.
NoStructure.png
* All topics are at the same level. Child topics have the parent topic name appended to their caption and title. When I built this, the item called Discounts and Promotions (last on left) was the parent, and the other four Discounts & Promotion items appeared as its children.
* I don't know where all those anchors at the top came from, or why the the page shows the stuff on every page that's never been visible on the edited page (Expand/Collapse, breadcrumb, etc.)

I had already started rebuilding the project from scratch by importing the published webhelp, which is why I can show what the project should really look like (I've cleaned up the hierarchy and normalized styles but there's still a lot of garbage on the pages that needs to be dealt with.

Image - for some reason it won't display this inline but it's visible below as an attachment.

Is there any way at all to magically turn my old HMXZ project into something that won't require many days of hand fixes? This isn't any better than the result of importing the old web help.

Thanks,
Elissa M.
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
User avatar
Tim Green
Site Admin
Posts: 23156
Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2002 9:11 am
Location: Bruehl, Germany
Contact:

Re: HMXZ project from 6 or 7 has major problems when opened in 9

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Elissa,

Your first screenshot and the single-level TOC show that what you received was not an original Help+Manual project. It is a project that has been "recovered" by re-importing WebHelp output from the HTML files, and since WebHelp export is a one-way street, you have lost the TOC structure and any project features like toggles etc, and have gained a lot of superfluous formatting tables and so on.

The best option here would be to locate the original project from which the WebHelp was exported, if possible. Otherwise I'm afraid you're going to have to remove the formatting tables and all the redundant anchors and recreate the toggles manually, and also adjust the TOC structure with the tools in Project > Manage Topics.
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.
Post Reply