How do I preview a single topic in a browser?

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Mellissa Ruryk
Posts: 12
Joined: Sat Nov 05, 2016 12:47 am

How do I preview a single topic in a browser?

Unread post by Mellissa Ruryk »

Newbie and I searched for Preview in browser but couldn't find anything. Nor does preview bring up anything in help (that I found useful).
Does one have to publish the entire project to see what one specific topic looks like in the browser? In Flare, you can click a preview button and it shows you (roughly) what you'd see.
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Tim Green
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Re: How do I preview a single topic in a browser?

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Melissa,

Welcome to the forum!

This is one of the drawbacks of the way that Help+Manual does not need to define any primary output format for your project. You can always export to any supported format at any time. However, this also means that you can't get a "preview" without actually exporting. However, you can do this quite quickly by using the option that allows you to publish just selected topics.
  1. Select the topic or topics you want to preview in the TOC (CTRL+Click and SHIFT+Click to select multiple topics)
  2. Select publish and if a skin is selected, click on the skin bar and select Remove Skin (this will speed up publishing).
  3. Click on the Table of Contents bar and select the option to only publish selected topics.
  4. Then publish
You can speed this up still further by going to Configuration > Publishing Options > WebHelp > Navigation and disabling the options to publish the keyword index and search pages. Turning off search in particular provides a massive speed increase. If you are using a skin to publish normally you can leave this turned off so that you can do quick previews like this.l
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
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