TOC-hidden topics; text attrib's in toggle headers

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Mark Wilsdorf
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TOC-hidden topics; text attrib's in toggle headers

Unread post by Mark Wilsdorf »

Mostly done with my H&M Web site, and a couple things come to mind as handy to have...

(1) I have quite a few phone-only topics (they are containers for linked snippits which on other pages are displayed directly, within desk_tablet tables). It would be nice if I could exclude those from showing in the Webhelp output TOC--maybe with an option on the Topic Options tab of such topics?

Here's a link to an example of one. It and its sibling topic could/should be hidden: http://www.goflagship.com/mp_recent_changes.html

Here's another phone-only topic which really would have been out of place as a child topic of the one which references it (Home), so I made it a child of a topic at the end of all others, but it's kind of goofy there, too: http://www.goflagship.com/zz_whatsnew.html

If this is unclear, let me know.


(2) It would be nice if text attributes (bold, italic, etc.) could be applied within Toggle captions.

Right now, a caption cannot read: Here's what you really need to know! The underlining/italics would break the toggle so that only part of the caption can activate the toggle. So my toggle captions are less expressive than I'd often like them to be.
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Tim Green
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Re: TOC-hidden topics; text attrib's in toggle headers

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Mark,

Both things that would be nice to have at first glance. Both things that are horrendously complex if you know how these things work. 8)

Different formatting within a link is something that might be made possible at some time, but it would mean major changes in the editor for a result that does not really have a very high priority. It might happen sometime, but at the moment I wouldn't hold my breath.

Hiding parts of the TOC is a much more serious objective and actually something we are considering in the long term -- and "long term" is really something you need to take seriously here. Doing this involves much, much more than you might think.

First of all, you have to decide how important security is -- just hiding things in the TOC is trivial, but everything would remain easily accessible to any teenager with even a basic understanding of how browsers work. If you really want the hidden topics to be genuinely inaccessible then the overheads become many orders of magnitude larger: Then you need a database and server-side software so that all the topics are actually stored in a database and rendered as HTML on the fly on request.

In addition to this, there is the question of the keyword index and search functions: You need to be able to exclude references to the hidden topics from the keyword index and search, and that is also far from trivial. :?
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Mark Wilsdorf
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Re: TOC-hidden topics; text attrib's in toggle headers

Unread post by Mark Wilsdorf »

I understand what you're saying about the development complexity with respect to any particular change a user might want.

As for the hidden TOC entries, you don't understand what I am asking...

This is not a security issue at all. It would be fine if those pages are publicly accessible, indexed by search engines, appear in the keyword index and search function, and all the rest. They are directly accessible via links from other pages, so I don't want them hidden from the world! I only want them to not be listed in the TOC. As things are now, they clutter up the TOC and make it appear more complex to users, and may slightly add to user confusion (for desk_tablet users) due to seeing the same content addressed within two different topics.

I hope this better explains what I'm after...
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Tim Green
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Re: TOC-hidden topics; text attrib's in toggle headers

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Mark,
They are directly accessible via links from other pages, so I don't want them hidden from the world! I only want them to not be listed in the TOC.
Aha -- if that's all you want that's already possible and has been as long as HM has existed. You just need to create the topic file without a TOC entry. You can do this by creating the topic in the Topic Files section instead of in the TOC; then it is automatically created without a TOC entry:

http://www.helpandmanual.com/help/index ... enotoc.htm

Removing TOC entries for existing topics is also simple. Just select the topic and press DELETE. Then in the dialog displayed, UNCHECK the option for deleting the associated topic file(s) before confirming the deletion, and then only the TOC entry will be deleted.

Similarly, you can create a TOC entry for a topic file that doesn't have one by dragging the topic from Topic Files into the TOC. This doesn't actually move anything; it just creates a TOC entry.
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.
Mark Wilsdorf
Posts: 151
Joined: Thu Dec 24, 2009 8:41 pm
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Re: TOC-hidden topics; text attrib's in toggle headers

Unread post by Mark Wilsdorf »

Tim,

I had a hunch such a thing might/should be doable in H&M--it turns out that I was right. (No shortage of ego here. :D)

Glad I re-phrased the question, and thanks as always for your excellent help and quick response time.
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