- Copy-paste the useful stuff into a GoogleDoc file. Each category has a file.
- In Robohelp, create an HTML file out of each question in a category, and in the navigation tree, bunch all questions of a category under their category.
Saving the GoogleDoc files as Word files, and importing to Robohelp didn't work coz during the Googledoc > Word conversion, the formatting (and hence, the sequence of questions and answers) went for a toss. - Export Robohelp files as Word files, proofread.
- In Robohelp, incorporate edits of stage 3.
Which means, compare the text line-by-line. - Generate CHM.
To me, this seems unnecessary labour; stages 2 and 4 are especially wasteful. So, over the past several days, I've been thinking of changing the eBook process so that we can:
- eliminate the duplication of copy-paste at the compilation stage
- do on-going edits
I've come up with the following plan:
- Use a database (simple row-column db) to store data. The db needs to let us:
- Append through a Web-based form. Fields: category_main, category_sub, question, answer 1_name_email_date, answer 2_name_email_date, answer 3_name_email_date etc.
- Search, based on fields
- Define user levels: writer can put and get, editor can put, get and change.
- For compiling, pull the data from the database and append XML tags. Each column is a tag.
- Transform the XML to HTML, compile as CHM. The "category_main" and "category_sub" tags tell us the TOC.
Let's see how it goes. I'll need to research a bit.
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2 comments:
Hi AB,
I do agree with your point on the RH work that needs to be done. But provided that we need to perform a proof-read work, is it possible to do it?
But still going by your points on XML, my thoughts on it:
Transform the XML generated from the database using XSLT.
Use the parsed XML in one of the compilers.
We can also check options for proof-read here.
I can check the compilers that enable you to perform this function.
And for your second point where you say that the import does not work because of the Google Doc conversion, just one point here. I never tried this option of importing files. This is because we had planned a requirement which was completely different. If we were just to display the responses as such, I would have gone ahead with importing of files. But we had planned to create a drop-down for every response which would have made the importing of files a tedious task rather than copying contents.
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