One of my clients has a WinHelp project that needs to be ported from RoboHelp for Word to another tool. So I've spent the last week testing the import procedures for various HATs.

Now, this is, overall, a pretty plain project. It has a lot of topics (4,021) and index entries (5,000+), not that many hyperlinks (just under 500), and no graphics. I've reformatted the Word documents, so I know that they're clean.

Import times have taken anywhere from 40 minutes to over three hours. Different issues I've run into:

• The content didn't import. (The topic headings were there, but the topics themselves were blank.)
• The formatting wasn't maintained. It was either ignored completely, or occasionally.
• Hidden text (used for comments in the original Word document) was either omitted or brought in as not hidden. (I can't decide which is worse.)
• The CNT structure was ignored. The original CNT only included 400 topics, but in several cases, they were imported as a flat list.
• The map numbers were ignored. (My idea of fun: re-entering 4000+ map numbers...NOT! ;-) )

What was also interesting was the time it took to compile the project. One HAT took anywhere from 45 minutes to 1 hour, 20 minutes to compile a WinHelp project. Another took 40 minutes. The original project took less than a minute, but this just points out the differences between RoboHelp for Word and the other HATs: RoboHelp always saved the raw RTF file so that it was immediately available for compilation. The other HATs have to generate the RTFs, which is where the time comes in.

I have more work to do on this...like talk to the different vendors and discover if it's my installation that is causing these problems or if these are legitimate problems that can be fixed. I'll let you know what I find out.

(And, no, I haven't forgotten about the HAT matrix. It's almost finished...but still not quite ready for publication.)