Importing HTML files with LOTS of tables

[DvoraElisheva]

Hi All,

I have a project I'm working on that will involve importing a legacy Help system that was created as a "website". The original author used tables to enable alignment, white space, etc. As a result, when I imported the files (via RoboHelp...) to Flare, I have at least 100 files that must be edited as follows:

1. remove the table formatting
2. apply styles
3. remove the manually created breadcrumbs and related links stuff, and create new
4. Split up content. Some of the pages are terribly long and include as many as 3-4 new topics

Being VERY new to Flare, I spent 4 hours yesterday, just trying to figure out how to move the text out of the tables and into a style.

Can anyone give me some wise advice on how best to import this content and set it up in Flare. Once imported, some of the content will need light editing - but if I don't get it set up properly, nothing will work well....

Thanks in advance.

Dvora

[Andrew]

Hopefully someone else here has a better idea, but if it were me: copy and paste. Forget importing and then trying to mess with things to get rid of the tables. Just copy / paste the text you want.

Having said that, you might be able to come up with some clever Find / Replace or scripted use of Regular Expressions that can automate the process, but that is only worthwhile if you're talking about a huge chunk of information.

[wbrisett]

Having said that, you might be able to come up with some clever Find / Replace or scripted use of Regular Expressions that can automate the process, but that is only worthwhile if you're talking about a huge chunk of information.

This is where a script or something along those lines will help you. I was able to recently bring in a 6,000 file/page HTML project with a ton of tables in them. I was going to write a script to strip out all the HTML formatting, and write the tags, but decided that could simply use a search and replace and tag the tables with the css style I was using. My final output out of Flare was handled correctly even though inside of Flare it didn't look correct. You might want to see if you can take a single HTML file, tag it the way you want, then compare the markup with what you are starting with. You may be able to then make some global changes before bringing it into Flare. HTML is a pain, especially if it isn't consistent.