(Disclaimer: You still need to have Microsoft Word installed on your computer for your Open Office files to work with Doc-To-Help.)
This is an expanded version of my post on Open Office Files and Doc-To-Help. I originally helped a customer with this migration because he wanted to use his Mediawiki content in Doc-To-Help and using Open Office as the intermediary was the only viable option. He also needed to keep his Mediawiki content intact, because customers still use that site. He just needed a way to also create manuals and compiled Help, as well as the option to create a cleaner, tri-pane web interface like NetHelp 2.0.
I assumed that all Open Office documents had the same formatting and template structure as the ones produced by Mediawiki, but there are slight differences. Standard Open Office documents are formatted more like regular Word documents, whereas Mediawiki files have their own style conventions and standard formatting. Since the customer was looking to keep updating and importing the Mediawiki content instead of doing a one-time content dump, it made more sense to change Doc-To-Help so it would accept the Mediawiki Open Office documents than it would to change the documents so Doc-To-Help would accept them.
You can download my project and Doc-To-Help templates here. This is how it works:
- Use the Collections extension in Mediawiki to export to a collection “book” that is in the Open Office (.ODT) format.
- Open the document (usually called collection.odt) in Open Office and save it as a Word 97/2000/XP (.doc) file.
- Create a new Doc-To-Help project and add the collection.doc file.
- Copy the template files C1H_NOMARGIN_MEDIAWIKI, C1H_HTML_MEDIAWIKI, and C1H_PRNOMARGIN_MEDIAWIKI from the zip file you downloaded and paste them here: C:\Users\<your user name>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates on your computer.
- In Doc-To-Help, go to the Home tab and select Add Template from the Source Template dropdown. Double-click the C1H_NOMARGIN_MEDIAWIKI file to add it.
- Go to the Project tab and click the Project Styles button:
- In the Project Styles dialog box, click the Add New Style button to add a new Paragraph style. You’ll be creating six Paragraph styles. The only things you’ll need to change once you’ve created the style are the HTML Name and the Type. (Note: You can choose all of these styles from the Name dropdown. You choose the Type from a dropdown. The only text you need to input is the HTML Name. Remember that the HTML Name must have a period at the beginning and must not contain any spaces — .HeadingArticle instead of Heading Article.)
a) Name: Chapter, HTML name: .Chapter, Type: Level 1
b) Name: HeadingArticle, HTML name: .HeadingArticle, Type: Level 2
c) Name: Heading2, HTML name: .Heading2, Type: Level 3
d) Name: Heading3, HTML name: .Heading3, Type: Level 4
e) Name: Heading4, HTML name: .Heading4, Type: Level 5
f) Name: Heading5, HTML name: .Heading5, Type: Level 6
g) Name: TextBody, HTML name: .TextBody, Type: Body Text
When you’re done creating and assigning Paragraph Styles, the dialog box should look like this:
From there, select your Target in the Home tab and click Rebuild. With the new paragraph styles assigned in Doc-To-Help and your templates, the formatting for the document and the structure of the table of contents will be the same in your Doc-To-Help project as it is in your Wiki and your Open Office document.
The zip file, which you can download here, has a project and templates that are already set up. You would just need to copy the template files to the Templates folder in Windows and use the Import Project Settings feature in Doc-To-Help to copy the Project Styles over to your new project. If you want to create your own custom templates, you can use Word’s Organizer to move the styles from your Open Office document over to Doc-To-Help’s pre-loaded templates. I included a handy document in the zip file called UsingTheOganizer.docx that show you how that’s done.
From here, you can use all the other single sourcing features that Doc-To-Help has, build whatever targets you need to provide to your end users, and even build and upload a NetHelp project as a SharePoint Wiki. Since your styles and project structure are already set up, updating your Doc-To-Help outputs is as easy as adding your new Collection document and building the project.
If you have a Mediawiki Wiki currently set up, try it out and let us know your results!
(No Ratings Yet)
