The RoboColum(n)

Awhile ago I knew someone who spent the best part of a day deleting all sort of what in his opinion were unwanted and unnecessary files from his Windows OS when he got a new PC. His logic was that the files would never be used, took up valuable disk space and their existence annoyed him so much that he was prepared to spend a large amount of time obliterating them. That was in the days of Windows 2.1 but could easily be applied to any subsequent Windows OS version.

The same could also be applied to any new RoboHelp project. This is because many moons ago, when RoboHelp was in an early incarnation, the decision was taken to make it an out of the box solution. Plug and play was the watchword and it was required that a help project could be produced with little or no former experience of the product. In those early days, the output types that could be produced was limited  but as others became available, the creation of each new project had to cope with them. So each project came complete with a number of style sheets (one for each output type) skins for flash or web based output, and all manna of other stuff designed to make it easy to get a project up and running in no time at all.

A minor problem with this is that you inevitably end up with lots of unused files in your project. They don’t do ay harm but if you are a tidy person, you’ll want to remove them. The files are easily identified by using the Unused Files report and you can delete the files from Windows Explorer. However one folder is excluded from the report. Part of each newly created default project is a folder called !SSL!. This little beauty exists to provide a default location for all output generated from your RoboHelp project.

In the days when the choice of output was limited to WinHelp and CHMs, the !SSL! folder didn’t exist. It didn’t really need to. WinHelp produced two output files and CHMs produced one, therefore the default output location could be left in the project folder. The apple cart was upset when other output types came into being, many of which generated multiple files. It was no longer practical to place them in the root of the project. Suddenly RoboHelp HTML needed a separate repository for each output type. The !SSL! folder (which stands for Single Source Layout) is automatically created with each new project. What is more, each output type you create by default adds a sub-folder to it to contain the output. For example, compile a CHM and it is created in the !SSL!\Microsoft_HTML_Help folder. Generate Webhelp and it goes in the !SSL!\WebHelp folder.

If all these folder layers annoy you like they do me, just get rid of them. CHMs can easily be created in the project’s root folder. WebHelp or FlashHelp output can be generated to another folder outside the project. Of course if you have merged help projects you’ll probably want to output to a separate folder anyway. Remember to change the output folder and path for any single source layouts you use or else the !SSL! folder will reappear when you create your output.

Better still, create a dummy project which has exactly the files you require to get going. When you need to create a new project, copy it to a new location, open it in RoboHelp, rename it and you have a new project with no unwanted files. This has the advantage of having master pages, variables, snippets, skins, style sheets, etc. that you use across all your projects.