Including hidden topics in Word and PDF builds

[martinsirl]

Hopefully a very simple question...

In my projects I have a number of 'hidden' topics, that is topics that are important but which are not referenced in the TOC (they are only accessed via hyperlinks on pages that ARE referenced in the TOC).

When I compile my projects as MS Word or PDF documents these topics do not appear in the outputted document at all, and the hyperlinks to them just appear as plain text.

Is there a way of including topics in Word or PDF output when they do not appear in the TOC?

Thanks in advance

Martin

[Tim Green]

Hi Martin,

Is there a way of including topics in Word or PDF output when they do not appear in the TOC?

No, because in PDF a topic that does not have a TOC entry simply does not exist, and cannot exist. It's important to understand that a PDF is really just the output to a printer saved as a file. In a stack of printed pages there is no way to make the pages "hide" and then somehow appear -- either they are there or they are not there, those are the only two possibilities. Without a TOC entry, there is nowhere for the topic to go in the physical document. The same applies to Word RTF files.

What you need to do is to create TOC entries for those hidden topics that are only available in PDF. This is possible because you can apply different build options to TOC entries and the topics they link to.

To create the TOC entry, make a note of the topic ID, create a new "topic" in the TOC in the position where you want the topic to be located in your PDF document, and instead of accepting the automatic topic ID, type or paste in the ID of the existing topic. Help & Manual will ask you if you want to link to the existing topic file.

Then right-click on the new TOC entry, and select PDF and Word RTF in the Include in Builds options and make sure that all the other options are deselected. Then go down to the corresponding topic file in the Project Files > Topic Files section and set its build options to either All Builds (so that it is always available) or PDF, RTF and all the other output formats where you want the topic to be available.

[martinsirl]

Great. Thanks for the quick reply.