Html Help or Html Workshop File Import Limitations

It's important to understand how importing into Help Builder works. Help Builder decompiles a CHM file into its consituent HTML files, and then imports those HTML files as raw HTML into each new topic created.

Cross Links

An attempt is made to fix up any project relative links and cross-link topics properly within Help Builder, but this process is not 100% accurate as it relies on parsing the HTML and retrieving topic content. Depending on the complexity of the HTML and link relations this may or may not catch all topic cross links.

Raw Html Import

Topics are imported as raw HTML - as is. This means there's no separation between headers and footers as you normally would do with Help Builder. Rather topics tend to be fully self contained and you likely have to adjust your templates to remove header and footer content to avoid double headers. Alternately you can go through topics and remove the header content and let Help Builder's header template do the header rendering.

HTML only editing available

Because topics are imported as raw HTML they must be edited using the HTML WYSIWYG editor 9( or raw HTML text) rather than as using Help Builders simplified text markup.

Limitations

Topics imported only from HHC Content File
The CHM import will only import topics that are contained in the HHC Table of Contents file. Any topics that are not referenced in the contents table are not imported as there's no way for Help Builder to know which files to import or what IDs to assign to it.

Topic Crosslinks to Topics in sub-Folders may not work
Depending on how topics are referenced in sub-folders, cross links to these topics might not be fixed up. Attemps are made to fix this up during import but not all scenarios are possible. Note that old HTML references to other topics do not work - instead help builder creates new topic ids and you should use Add Bookmark Link to add update a cross-link.

Images referenced from sub-Folder Topics may not link properly
Images on topics that live in subfolders likely will not render correctly depending on how they are referenced. If referenced by relative path the path references will be off since all topics in Help Builder render from the root folder. These are easily fixable by adjusting the path.

Import as a Starting Point

An import from Html Help file or an HTML Help Workshop project should be treated as a starting point only not as a finished product.