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Regular expressions, which allow you to do complex find and replace actions, made the cleanup work I wanted to do a lot easier. There is an actual tool for this, but I did my work through Dreamweaver, which has a "Use Regular Expressions" check box on the Find window.
I'll mention that I am a satisfied user of FAR and used that tool for some non-RE work.
Whether you can use DW or FAR with content files in Flare, I cannot answer. One clarification, though. If you are working with RH HTML, you would not need to necessarily 're-import' your files. When I am looking at my file list in RH, if I double-click, the file opens in DW. You can set up RH to open your HTML files with a 3rd party tool so even if you are not using DW, that would be an avenue to explore. When I make a change in DW and save, RH recognizes the change and updates the "Modified Date" column. If I do global find and replace actions in FAR, RH (somewhat begrudgingly) eventually updates that column as well, though it seems sluggish (to me).
That all said, I would *not* approach a project like this by stripping all formatting from the HTML. I would probably start out with figuring out what styles I was going to need and construct my CSS file first. Then as I encountered a requirement for a new style, add it to the CSS file and apply it to the HTML code. Stripping all the CSS, especially if whatever is there gives you the presentation you want, seems the wrong way to do it, especially b/c it seems you are both interested in cleaning up the underlying code.
Good luck.
Paul
Chris Despopoulos asked:
> Hi all...
>
> I've inherited a RoboHelp project with many topics. I
> want to apply uniform formatting to it and get rid of all the other
> formatting stuff in there. There's too much legacy formatting, it's
> inconsistent, and it's giving me real problems.
>
> I thought maybe
> I could easily wipe out all the formatting, and then start fresh,
> applying the formatting to each section in a specific order, so I can
> reasonably back out formatting, or otherwise control my topics.
>
> Has
> anybody encountered this problem? How did you deal with it? Is there
> a way to run the HTML files through an HTML cleaner, strip out
> everything CSS-related and non-standard, and then start over?
> Can I do
> that to the files where they reside in the project? Will
> that break my
> project? Or must I save all the HTML files outside of
> RoboHelp domain,
> run a cleanup process, and then re-import the HTML into a new RoboHelp
> project? Can I re-import in that way?
>
> Any help or insights are greatly appreciated...
. . . and if there's a generic response that also applies to MadCap Flare
projects, I wouldn't mind hearing about it, too.
I'm pretty much the author of my own grief on my projects, but I
started years ago in RH, two complete corporate mergers (and styles) ago,
before we switched from RH to Flare, and before I had any idea what I was doing.
When re-using and re-purposing content, I did a lot of arbitrary cutting
and pasting, not necessarily respecting boundaries that Flare thinks I
should have respected. There's a lot of crud in my pages that, if
cleaned up, might make things work more smoothly.
I'm especially interested in not breaking my projects.
I'm especially, especially interested in not breaking my projects in ways
that I won't notice for days or weeks until I've made a boatload of
changes and updates.
- Kevin
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Are you looking for one documentation tool that does it all? Author,
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