Premium Pack Webhelp Skin and loading TOCs automatically

[Benjamin Bruecker]

Hi,

We are currently using Help and Manual 6.5.5 for Building Webhelps and PDFs. The help is context sensitive and opening the topics with TOC in a different frame. We are in most cases glad about Help and Manual, except some some limitations in the Webhelp, which we wanted to solve using Premium-Skins (Version 2.32):

1. open Toggles using links from other topics
2. printing topics

Both is working with the pre-configured Skins very well. So I re-adapted the "WebHelp_MetroBlue"-Skin for our companies design and our demands. This is working in most cases -- except one big problem: by using the context sensitive links the topics are now opened without TOCs. instead the link "Click here to display Table of Contents" is displayed. We wanted to offer our customers the help with TOC without the need of clicking somewhere. Setting the variable "TOC_ONSTART" to "true" does not help.

Could you please give me a hint how to load the TOC if the Topic-HTML-Files is opened?

Thanks,
Benjamin

[Tim Green]

Hi Benjamin,

by using the context sensitive links the topics are now opened without TOCs. instead the link "Click here to display Table of Contents" is displayed.

This is happening because you are not using the full WebHelp linking syntax. Instead of just linking to topic_id.htm you need to use this syntax:

index.html?topic_id.htm#anchor_id

where "index.html" is your index file, "topic_id.htm" is the ID of the target topic in all lower case letters (special characters in topic IDs are replaced by underscores, it's best not to use them at all in topic IDs) and "anchor_id" is an optional anchor, also in all lower case letters. (Anchors should also be defined in all lower case.)

Linking directly to a topic file without the index.html? prefix used to automatically reload the entire UI with the TOC. However, Google no longer indexes pages that reload themselves like this so we have turned this setting off by default. Now linking directly to a topic page only will open the topic file on its own. The current skins provided with HM and the Premium Pack skins automatically display a "Show Table of Contents" link above the title of the topic when this is done so that the user can manually show the entire UI.

If being indexed by Google doesn't matter to you, you can turn on the automatic reload function again in the skin in Configuration > Publishing Options > WebHelp > Navigation. Activate the option "When a topic is loaded outside the navigation frame, force it to reload the navigation frame".

However, it is much more efficient to use the full syntax and avoid the automatic reload. This also saves bandwidth.

[Benjamin Bruecker]

Hi Tim!
Wow that's a pretty fast! Thank you for the detailed explanation. I guess this will solve my problem.
Regard's Benjamin