Migrating from RoboHelp 2017 to Madcap Flare

[Dennetti]

We are planning to move our Online Help from RoboHelp 2017 to Madcap Flare, and wondered if anyone could share their experiences of doing this. It would be good to hear of any common problems or gotchas. Thanks very much for any advice.

[Psider]

At a previous job we migrated a complex merged system so we had a lot of cross project links to fix because of the different source and output folder structures. There was a bit of tidy up on RH specific junk code and I think a few widgets (Topic TOC?) didn't migrate across - that may have been fixed in the meantime, it's been quite a few years. I can't recommend learning RegEx and getting TextCrawler enough. TextCrawler has a brilliant preview system where you can see the effect of a RegEx on actual content as you're writing it. You can then also save the RegEx for use later.

Definitely practice on a copy of a project first and, as backwards as it seems, use a more complex project (or practice on two, a simple one and then a complex one if you want to ease in). Import and then thoroughly check the output to see what works and what's gone wrong.

Once we had the first project done and RegEx scripts done, the other projects were pretty simple, just requiring a tweak here or there for little things.

[Dennetti]

Thanks very much for your insights. Did you have any problems with the CSS file? For example, did the table styles import OK? I was just wondering if I might have to apply table styles differently in Flare. Cheers.

[Psider]

I can't remember sorry. It was a while ago. On the plus side, I don't remember any particular problems, so maybe that's a good sign?

[Dennetti]

Thanks a lot. Sounds good.