Snippet Feature Request

[Ed Dressel]

Long time user. Love H&M, and always tell others about it. Great tool.

I've requested this before, but obviously I didn't do a very good job explaining it, but it sure would be nice to have. I will try to explain it better this time.

I use snippets throughout my H&M project. Lots of them. They save a lot of time. But they also have a shortfall: if a snippet contains a link to another place in the documentation, it is always jumps to that location. Sometimes a long snippet can be used in different places but the links need to be pointed to different places. So I would like to be able to redirect when a snippet is inserted.

What I am thinking (and there may be a better way to do this) is to be able to right-click over the snippet and select "Snippet Properties" in the popup menu. Clicking on it would display a dialog that included the ability to redirect any of the links in the respective snippet to another place in the help file. That way I could redirect the links to the correct link.

That would save me hours of time, and the snippets would be more useful .

I hope this makes sense this time.

Ed Dressel

[Tim Green]

Hi Ed,

I can understand the desire for this but it's one of those things that would be so cumbersome, complicated and error-prone in practice that the chances of their ever being implemented are unfortunately quite slim.

It is also something that can be worked around, to a certain extent, with careful planning. External links should always work, and if the targets are in the current project the links will work if topics with the same IDs exist in the current project. This isn't a solution if the link needs to point somewhere completely different, of course. Then the only way around it is to have multiple copies of the snippets for different purposes. You could organize your snippet files in folders for this, for example.

[Rainer Oehry]

I have the same situation with one snippet that should point to different targets.

I split the snippet into two "inline" snippets—one with the text up to the link and the second one with the subsequent text. I then insert both snippets and add/insert the individual link text and target in between.

Works for me, and doesn't seem to be more complicated than modifying snippets properties etc.

[Ed Dressel]

Tim:

Thanks for getting back so quickly.

I can understand the desire for this but it's one of those things that would be so cumbersome, complicated and error-prone in practice that the chances of their ever being implemented are unfortunately quite slim.

Sigh. I think I could address "cumbersome" and "error prone":

1) I can see it might be a little cumbersome, but having to break snippets into sections with multiple sections before and after links is cumbersome as well. I would even be willing to propose a GUI design for you to consider.
2) For error prone: It also produces problems where textual changes are needed and have to be made several times, making the current implementaiton error prone.

For the last itme, "chances of ...being implemented are.. slim": I can only ask. I think it would be pretty slick way to address a problem, but I am only one voice.

I appreciate you listening.

Ed Dressel

[Ed Dressel]

I split the snippet into two "inline" snippets—one with the text up to the link and the second one with the subsequent text. I then insert both snippets and add/insert the individual link text and target in between.

That is what I do--but some snippets are divided into 3 or 4 sections, and I have over 90 snippets that I have to manage this way. (The full PDF is over 500 pages).

Ed Dressel

[Rainer Oehry]

If I want to use "divided" snippets with a couple of different link targets, I use a "dummy" topic (opened in a separate tab) where I insert the snippets, combined with the various targets:

SnippetPart1 Target1 SnippetPart2

SnippetPart1 Target2 SnippetPart2

SnippetPart1 Target3 SnippetPart2

Then I just copypaste the appropriate combination into the topic I am working on.