Create Flare project from published WebHelp?

[doc_guy]

Does anybody know an easy way to take an existing Flare 5 output (WebHelp) and convert or import it back into a Flare 5 project?

I have published output, but I seem to have misplaced the original Flare 5 project. (Don't ask. I don't know. <grimace>)

Thanks.

[RamonS]

Can't really think of anything that will definitely work, but given what you have the way to look at is to import the HTML files less the scripts. I would take a handful of files and throw them at Flare and see what happens when you make it eat its own food. My guess it chokes on things that get inserted at compile time. Finding out what those are and if they can be identified in such a way that a mass find & replace is possible might shave off some time. I wouldn't spend hours on trying to recover the ToC. In comparison it is easy to recreate it. Other things such as indexing are a different story. You can look at the output files to figure out what was indexed, which may be of some help, but I am sure there is a lot of work to be redone. I'd focus on getting the topics in cleanly first, then make the ToC so that you have a new project that you can build.

[NorthEast]

I've had to do this with a very small project - it's a bit of a tedious job though, so I hope yours isn't too big.
You can strip out some of the dead wood with a find and replace (I used FAR HTML to do this), things like the breadcrumbs, mini-TOCs, header links. Other things like drop-downs or expanding text you'll probably have to do by hand. And you need to start again with things like your index, glossary, conditional text.
Sorry!

[RamonS]

When the project isn't too big maybe copy & paste into new topics will be faster. You can still rescue the style sheet and then need to reapply the styles. It is a lot of work, but when there aren't many parts that need styles and the number of images is low it might be faster than using some tricked out replacement routines that cover only half.

[doc_guy]

Thanks all. My project isn't large, thankfully, and I hadn't done any indexing, which is nice. I hoped there would be a super easy way, but oh well. I'll be okay.

[i-tietz]

Maybe you can use a version of RoboHelp? Start a HTML Help Project, import the HTML files and stylesheet, import the RH project in Flare?
If it's old enough a RH version it doesn't use XML - so you don't have a lot of fuzz when importing the HTML files into RH.

[doc_guy]

My project was small enough that copying and pasting actually worked really well, because it picked up on the conditions.

Thanks for all your help. I've completed the process.

[Madcap Guru]

The topics still won't look great if you look at the code, but it should work for a small project. Index entries will be gone also