Many thanks to Help+Manual user Ty Griffin for providing the information that made this tutorial possible.

Importing Doc-to-Help projects

The process of converting the Word files that constitute a D2H project to HM is quite straightforward and consists of only two steps:

1.Use Word to save your file(s) as RTF.

2.then use HM to import the RTF file(s), following the instructions for RTF.

The HM converter will import all formatting, styles, index entries, headings, bookmarks, cross references, links and so on and translate them into their HM equivalents. However, there are also some special considerations that are helpful when you are dealing with different types of D2H projects.

General Recommendation

It's a good idea to experiment with a smaller D2H project first to get the hang of the conversion process, checking through the items below as you do so. Once you feel confident, then you can move on to converting larger projects.

One Document Versus Several

D2H allows you to have multiple Word documents in a project, and to use D2H styles to link topics between those documents. HM knows about and properly handles Word styles, but it doesn't know about D2H styles. So all the inter-document links using the D2H styles will break when you go a conversion to HM.

In order to avoid breaking all your links, you need to do two things:

1.Take all your Word files and merge them together into one big Word file.

2.Replace your D2H links with Word links (i.e., bookmarks). If you used many of the D2H styles and macros, you'll have a big job. But if you're familiar with Word, it will probably be easier to remove the D2H styles in Word than in HM. This can be a big job, but is worth the effort.

Bookmarks

In Word, there are regular and hidden bookmarks. When you create a link Word, you can either (a) create your own bookmark and then link (insert cross reference) to that bookmark, or (b) link to a heading in Word, in which case Word creates the bookmark for you. If you create your own, the bookmark name is normally something sensible like "BuildingTrains." If you link to a Word heading, without having first defined a bookmark, then Word will automatically generate and use a hidden bookmark with an arcane name like Ref_123456789.

When you convert your document to HM, all those bookmarks are going to work (i.e., link) just fine. However, all the hidden bookmarks are going to have names like Ref_123456789 and of course you won't know what they mean. So it is a good idea to make sure you have "good" names for your bookmarks before converting to HM. On the other hand, changing the names of the bookmarks in HM is much easier than doing it in Word.

Heading Levels

D2H will accept and properly process heading levels 1 through 8. The HM convert-from-RTF program only handles six levels of heading. So make sure you're prepared to deal with that. Note that HM itself handles 10? levels of heading, but the conversion program only handles six. So in Word, you can (a) convert all your greater-than-6 level headings  to level 6, and then convert them back to 7/8/9... in HM after the conversion. [[Tim or other HM person: I'm not sure how many levels H&M supports. Please clarify. ]] Also note that HM headings greater than level 7 are not indented further than 7 in the finished document. They act like levels 8/9/10 etc, but they don't look like it.

Popups

In D2H, you assign a heading level (D2H says "5," but I used "9") to use as pop-ups. HM doesn't know about D2H's popups. So:

•Make sure that the popups in Word have a heading level of less than seven.

•Create a list of your popups so that in HM, where th#e popups won't be distinguished from the other headings, you know which ones to work on.

Then, after the conversion to HM:

1.Delete the popup topics from the TOC and see sure to uncheck the "xxxx" box at the bottom of the dialog box before deleting. This will delete the topic from the TOC, but not from the project topic files.

2.Go Project Files > Topic Files and change the topic type from Default to Popup. That's it. The popups topics will now pop up as expected when you link to them.

Character Styles

In Word, it is possible to have style that says, for example, bold. When that style is applied, it will make bold whatever other style it is applied to. In HM, styles don't work like that. They must specify not just bold but all the other font characteristics as well.

This is not necessarily a problem, and there's not really anything that you can do about it. It's just an awareness to have: be aware that your character styles won't behave the same in HM as they do in Word/D2H.

Hidden Text and Text Boxes

Hidden text and text boxes are not supported in Help+Manual and will not be imported.

Index Entries

If you have index entries in your Word document, you should probably find all those that are at the end of topic and move them to somewhere else in the topic. Hidden text you can just delete, since it is not going to survive the conversion anyway.