Lost TOC items

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Robert McConnell
Posts: 27
Joined: Thu Nov 22, 2007 4:23 pm

Lost TOC items

Unread post by Robert McConnell »

With two projects open in the same instance of Help & Manual 7.3, I was trying to copy a topic from one project and then paste it onto the TOC of another project. Somehow a number of items disappeared from the TOC. The corresponding topics remain in the Topic Files. Is there any way to reconstruct the TOC and reconnect the items to their original xml topics files?
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Tim Green
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Re: Lost TOC items

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Robert,

What happened was you accidentally selected and deleted the TOC entries (possibly very quickly). In all Windows programs I tend to prefer keyboard shortcuts to drag and drop for cutting and pasting precisely this reason; it's much too easy for something like this to happen.

To create new TOC entries for the topic files, drag the files from Topic Files and drop them in the TOC where you want the entries to be. After that you can use the Manage Topics features to adjust your structure. You can also do this with the Add Topic tool if you want: Click in the TOC where you want to insert the entry and select Add Topic. Then select the TOC Link option and "Link to topic in this project". You can then select the ID of the topic file you want to link to.

It's important to know that the TOC is really just a file containing a list of links pointing to topic files. All the topic files always live in the Topic Files section, and only there. They don't have any secondary existence in the TOC section. When you select a TOC item to edit a file, HM just displays the file from Topic Files for editing.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Robert McConnell
Posts: 27
Joined: Thu Nov 22, 2007 4:23 pm

Re: Lost TOC items

Unread post by Robert McConnell »

Many thanks for the great explanation. It all makes sense now. There seems to have been just one fairly high TOC entry that took out all the child entries.
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