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Subject:RE: Single-sourcing Using MS Word From:"Sarah Blake" <Sarah -dot- Blake -at- microfocus -dot- com> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:55:21 -0000
> I've thought about creating the doc in RoboHelp and using its output
to
> single-source, but in my experience you have to do quite a bit of
cleanup
> and then there's the issue of cover page/toc/etc. that would have be
> inserted separately, I think.
I've single-sourced with RoboHelp (RH X5), so it is possible, and not
quite as bad as you fear. In order to do it you need:
- A really good, tight match between the styles you're using in RH and
the ones in your Word template
- A set of Word macros to do most of your cleanup (there are some fine
RH-to-Word table cleanup macros available on the web)
>From my recollection you should be fine as far as TOC/index goes; the
main problem is headers and footers, as how RH does them is hardcoded so
you'll need to clean them up in Word afterwards.
To give you some idea, it used to take me about an hour to clean up, to
publishable standard, a 300-page document from RH output.
It's not a perfect solution, though!
Sarah
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