Converting PDF/Word Docs into Help Center articles

Yes it worked on the front end for me.

Can you post a screenshot of your html? or maybe a url?

You could email it to me andj at bizstudio dot co dot nz

Thanks Andrew, I appreciate the help.  Uploading as a theme asset and then putting an iframe in the article appears to work while editing the article, but going to the actual article in the Help Center, the iframe doesn't load.

Did this work for you when you tried?

I can convert PDF into Word Docs, but it appears I had the same exact issue when trying to get Word Doc content into the editor, images stripped.

While I'd love to take Diane's recommendation, our content is years of internal IT policy docs which need to be made available even if they're seldom if ever used.  Another huge hassle with not being able to get PDF or Word Doc content easily into our Help Center is this means I have to get everyone who is making new docs to use only the Zendesk editor, or do their work twice...  and that simply won't fly, and nor should it.

Hello Kevin - just in case you weren't aware - Diane and I are both volunteer moderators, We are Zendesk users, but not employees.  Depending on your account level you may be able to open a support request - but hey we like helping!

For your interest - I tried doing this directly from an upload in the article and it didnt work well - hence why I swapped to uploading as a theme asset.  You could also be able to pull these from another web resource - but havent tried that.

Hello Kevin,

In Helpcenter go into the option to edit your theme - select 'Assets' and upload your PDFs there... and grab the location code from the file when uploaded.

Then in your article, go into the code editor and paste code like this...

<p><iframe src="//p5.zdassets.com/hc/theme_assets/123/12345/my-pdf.pdf" width="100%" height="700px"></iframe></p>

You may need to modify the height and width code to suit your theme.  I did this on ours to demonstrate and it worked nicely.

oh - PDF to Word might help... pdftoword.com

Hi Kevin

I recently read a blog...and it escapes me where now...but it was about someone converting their old documents into a content management system and the pain of this.  So I'll go a different route here.

One of the things the Content Guru / Blog Author talked about was taking a look at your current content. 

It's like cleaning your room as a kid.  The toys you play with daily, the toys you play with occasionally, and the ones you get rid of to make room for new toys.  :)

Is there stuff that really is old, but you don't want to lose it?  Keep it in PDF form then so you have the historical doc.  That can be attached to a "blurb" which you can then make searchable in your Help Center.

Since you can look at metrics of what people are searching, you may find that no one cares about certain documents and they can quietly go away.  I think probably 3/4 of my content never gets touched even though all of it is searchable.

You probably have have some very key pieces that you couldn't live without, and those should get the whiz bang conversion immediately. 

The rest can be done as you can get to them, or done as the PDFs, knowing that you're going to take a certain number each week and fix them.  That can even be your "hook"...ooh updated content here!! woohoo.

I do all my documents in HTML and then paste them in.  I want to be able to format them off line and spell check etc.  I also house my images elsewhere and use links because I use the images in more than one document.  When our software changes, then I can "swap" the image instead of updating a full link.

I agree with Andrew on the image naming - that has kept me sane.  I don't do mine based on article, I do it based on part of the system since I use them in multiple articles.  I just keep most of them generic enough that they can be multi-use.

Let us know what you come up with!  I love to see how others conquer their challenges  :)

Diane

I certainly want to avoid reconstructing all these documents.  

Could you give me some guidance on what would be involved to get them into an iframe?  I'm guessing I would need to upload them and have the iframe point to that internal asset?  If that essentially accomplishes what I'm going for (content in the help center that doesn't need to be downloaded) that would be great.

Do you have a sample source you could provide or instruction for doing so?

Thanks!

Copying and pasting content into a text editor is not all that simple - but I don't think it works in Zendesk articles at this point anyway.  Even copying and pasting from PDF into a Word Doc can go very messy.  You can use the code editor, but once again this is not going to cope with clipboard images.

Options would be:

Save all your images down with a good naming convention (article3_image2 etc), then upload the lot and build your article with copy and paste text and inserting the images as needed.

Or maybe you might want to iframe the pdf, and then have some text outside the iframe describing the article.