Basics for Converting RoboHelp to Flare

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ktbCA57
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 472
Joined: Wed Feb 04, 2009 7:45 am

Basics for Converting RoboHelp to Flare

Post by ktbCA57 »

I am initially looking for what the basic steps would be for such a project. I am interviewing for a position where they are looking for someone who can make this conversion. I have experience converting, but it's been many years - and MANY years that I've even looked at RoboHelp, so I don't recall a lot of the differences... I am quite familiar with Flare having used it for about 11 years now - and currently.

I would like to at least be able to provide the basic steps I would see myself taking to make this conversion... i would imagine I would:'

1) start with the CSS and make sure styles are accounted for
2) make the import
3) apply stylesheets and master pages
4) go through and update/apply table styles

does that make sense or is there a different way to approach this?

Is there an efficient way to deal with hyperlinks and tables other than going thru each topic?? I assume for hyperlinks I would run a report to find broken links - yes?
What other major considerations am I missing?

Thanks for any input!
Psider
Propellus Maximus
Posts: 811
Joined: Wed Jul 06, 2011 1:32 am

Re: Basics for Converting RoboHelp to Flare

Post by Psider »

Like you it's been MANY years since I did this. I'm not sure what improvements have been made to the Flare conversion process.

But I can recommend TextCrawler to help fix all your links. It supports regular expressions and has a nifty preview feature that lets you see what your regex will do to a reale piece of code. You can save the regex to run later; super helpful if there are multiple projects to upgrade. If the project is in RH2019 or RH2020, then the links may not be as problematic as in Classic as some of the structures are now more similar to Flare. If the conversion involves merged projects, I suspect the difficulties will remain though.

I can't remember what we did with table styles. Ours were pretty simple, so we might have gotten away with just creating new Flare tables styles with the same name.

Consider all the placeholders, like breadcrumbs and topic toc as the technology is different, so you may need to have a regex script to replace the RH code with equivalent Flare code.

If they want a skin that is substantially similar to their RH one, you may need to factor in time to customise one.

If CSH is involved, I think you'll need to work with developers to adjust the help call.
ktbCA57
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 472
Joined: Wed Feb 04, 2009 7:45 am

Re: Basics for Converting RoboHelp to Flare

Post by ktbCA57 »

Thanks Psider - I'm glad I wasn't too far off from the considerations that need to be made. I'm just about to interview with the company so I wanted to have a few tidbits in my pocket so I don't sound totally ignorant of the process.

Thanks for taking the time to provide such detail!
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