Converting PDF/Word Docs into Help Center articles

@Andrew J - and everyone else--

Am I the only one getting an "AccessDenied" and "HostID" error today when posting the PDF in the iframe?

I do NOT get an error when viewing articles with the PDF already embedded; only when trying to create an article or edit an existing article and embedding the PDF in the iframe.

Any ideas?

Hi all

I just started working with this tonight within my Help Center and ran in to the same issue. I remembered reading a previous post about some iframes not displaying correctly unless you allow unsafe content within your Help Center. Try going to Help Center Settings and checking the box like I did. It immediately worked for me and now my embedded PDFs are visible below. Hope this helps!

Hi Sergio,  I had very mixed results with Andrew's iframe recommendation, and ended up not using it.

Frankly, I get the impression Zendesk is just being stingy with their storage and wants to prevent customers from uploading years of content.  Allowing the conversion of PDF and Word to Help Center articles seems like a trivial feature to implement.

I got a very similarly unhelpful answer when I called support about migrating the ticket content from our legacy ticketing system into Zendesk.  I was blown off because "most customers don't find much value in that".   Because who needs years of hard won documentation.

Is there any updates on this issue?

I followed Andrew J's instructions of March 14th and inserted the PDF as an asset. However, I can see my PDF as an editor but from the end-user perspective, they cannot see it. What am I missing?

Please see attached picture.

Hi Jireh and Sergio - 

I'm checking around to see if anything is in the works to improve this process. In the meantime, it would be super helpful if you could head over to this thread in the Product Feedback forum to up vote the feature request and provide your detailed use case for the Product Managers. 

Let me know if you have any questions; I'll update if and when I find more info/a better solution. 

I am in the process of migrating all our documents to the Zendesk Help Center and I have stumbled across the same issue everyone is this thread has. I have every document in Word and PDF. 

I tried the copy-and-paste from an HTML Word view and the document renders decent but only if you have no images embedded in the document. Most of my other documents have images. Images are stripped.

I also tried the suggestion of adding the PDF to the assets section of the them editor and then copy the code and paste it on the document. That did not give me any results.

Is there a simple and viable solution to the massive migration of documents to the Zendesk platform without having to reconstruct each document?

Hi Everyone!

Hate the jump on to a prevoiisly opened thread, but would love to get some insight on fixing this issue as I have the same problem. Tons of previously existing content in PDF format from our parent company that would need to be translated to "Zendeskian" to add to our help center. 

Has anyone had any further luck with a solution?

@andrew

now that i'm in the thick of this conversion part, let's just say it stinks like old milk.

i pulled all my articles into Word so that i could have reps proof and critique the content.  I've copied my Help Center and Wes has done the coding.

It's not active yet.  I started taking the "easy articles" - that shouldn't need much updates, and popped them up in the new editor for cleanup.

Y'know in horror movies how something happens outside and everyone runs out side to see what happened?  Well, I did it...I looked at the HTML code.   Just. Don't.

I'll admit I have not done much with HTML in years, but I did write all these docs for Web Portal and they had some standards.  In the new Help Center if I have to make edits...it's just awful.  The first one i got to has inconsistent fonts and the bulleted lists are not bulleting.

I may try to copy / paste out of Word an into new HC documents to see if that will wipe everything.  Not really what I had intended to spend my time doing.  :(

D

Oh that would stink having years upon years to convert.

Andrew has an interesting point for new stuff with HTML though.  Are your peeps able to plug stuff into an HTML template?

I guess it depends if you are the final say in content...or whether you are just the distributor of content.

In my world...I end up being the SME...and during our low season I go brain-picking.  Like "tell me all the crap you learned this year about TopicX" and I take notes and add that to whatever constructed document I started.

I've seen what the sales folks put out when left to their own devices  ;)

Probably it is unrealistic for people to expect to write articles in their personal editor of choice, then be able to magically convert them perfectly into Zendeskian - would be nice - but murder for the designers.

If you can get them to type up in word or notepad with a name and placing for image in the text, then you can just copy and paste this. and add the images.

However, if they can create the articles as 'drafts' in Zendesk, I would think that would be good. Whoever is your content manager can tidy them up before publishing.

Maybe your people could write it all in HTML ... or maybe not :)