Migrating from RoboHelp

[smurray]

Hi,

I am about to migrate a project created in RoboHelp over to Flare. I am not going to import the RoboHelp project file because the structure is so different from the Flare project structure (which I like).
So what do I do? Do I recreate all the content I have in Flare or is there another way of doing this?
After then what is the best workflow process to use i.e. master pages, templates, snippets, variables etc. What should I do first? It seems like such a huge task and I don't want to go about it the wrong way round so if there is any documentation on a typical Flare workflow I would love to see it.

Thanks

Susan

[RamonS]

When you say "the structure is so different" what exactly do you mean? Flare will take the RoboHelp project and import it resulting in a Flare project. Depending how badly gummed up the RH project is you have to do some work and fix a bunch of things of various nature, but ideally you get the same output.
Sure, you can copy and paste the text, but then you have to recreate the ToC, reindex, recreate all links, assign new mapIDs and aliases, and some more things I assume. The benefit is that you start off with a clean project. I'd consider that for a small help project of maybe 50 to 100 topics tops. Anything above might just be easier to patch up afterwards. I recommend you make a few test imports tweaking the settings and see what happens.
Where to use snippets and variables depends on the content. If there is little to none repeating content then you'd have no reason to use snippets or variables. Master pages are something to think about, but you can add them at any time. My recommendation is to first see that you get into a position to generate output that works, then bother with prettyfying it.

[KevinDAmery]

I would agree with RamonS. However, if you do decide to rebuild from scratch, here are some things I would consider doing:

- Rather than rewriting all the topics, copy the .htm files into the Flare project. When you open them, Flare will convert them to it's flavour of xml.

- Also copy over your css file - you can then direct the topics to make use of that stylesheet in the topic properties panel. This will save you having to rebuild the stylesheet.

- I would then create master pages and a skin to use, and fine tune them so they look the way you want them to. What can help in this process is if you make a short (2-3 topic) TOC and assign it to a target. This way, you can build the target quickly when you want to test your output, rather than having to wait a few minutes for the full project to build.

- Make variables for any terminology that is specific to your product or that is subject to change later.

- Using snippets is an excellent idea, but the way I typically create them is I write a topic normally, then if I come to another topic later that would be appropriate for content from the first topic I go back and make a snippet out of the relevant blocks. It may just be me, but I find it difficult to anticipate which things will need to be snippets before I've written other content.

[smurray]

Thanks.
I'll try an import project and start a mini-one from scratch to compare.