The RoboColum(n)

My wife and I have a running joke about how we organise things. I like order. It’s a man thing I guess. CDs are in racks sorted alphabetically by artist and books are sorted by genre and then size. It’s neat, tidy and easy to manage. Her method of organising is to have lots of piles of stuff littered everywhere. What is even worse is that she knows exactly in which pile that receipt for £2.49 for a cheap brooch bought nine months ago is! I digress!

When it comes to RoboHelp WebHelp and WebHelp Pro output files I am equally as anal. Things are a little easier of course as the files are very handily located in a folder all of their own and are generated / published to a location of your own choosing. But over time you can end up with lots of erroneous files. Take for example a project that is generated and published for the first time. Everything is brand spanking new and the output files are exactly what you require. Move on a few project versions and you may have renamed topic files, deleted baggage files, amalgamated map files, deleted index and/or TOC files. In fact just about any change to a project can result in a previously generated / published output file to be redundant. To make matters worse, because of the publishing workflow you have a duplicate of everything. Your generation directory has the output as it was created by your Single Source Layout. Your published location has a copy of it. So to delete files you have to go to both locations via Windows Explorer and manually delete them.

Of course if you are not bothered by redundant files it really doesn’t matter. They don’t do any harm apart from clogging up disk space, but me being me I like to keep things clean. The problem is, there is no way to clean up redundant files from within RoboHelp. This is a bit of an oversight in my opinion and some single source layout option to delete them would be useful. Maybe I’ll go and submit another feature request before filling a copy away in my Microsoft OneNote notebook; filed alphabetically of course ;-)