Toggle icons changing on Premium Pack Skins

[Matt Kendall]

Hi Tim

I'm back again! Thought I'd kill all my birds with many stones this week.

Quick question. Why is it that when I publish with a premium pack skin, the standalone topics with Book icons are switched to Page icons?

I have some Main topics with no child topics and they are set as Book icons on my editor, yet when I publish, they switch to pages. Is there an easy way around this?

Thanks.

[Tim Green]

Hi Matt,

Please don't use book icons for topics that are not chapters. That creates confusing navigation and a large proportion of your users will think that your TOC is not working properly because they will expect a chapter to open when they click on those items.

The skins use custom icons that are defined in the skin, so any icons you set in your TOC in Help & Manual will be ignored. You can turn that off in the skin (in Configuration > Publishing Options > WebHelp > Navigation), but if you do you may have to play around with the CSS for the TOC to get everything lined up properly again, because the sizes will be different. The colors will also no longer really match, so it may not be worth it.

[Matt Kendall]

Thanks Tim

The topics were chapters, but with no child topics. I added some more content as child topics to get around it.

[Tim Green]

Hi Matt,

The topics were chapters, but with no child topics.

That's a contradiction in terms. There is no such thing as a chapter with no child topics. The definition of a chapter is a topic with child topics. If it doesn't have child topics it can't be a chapter.

[Matt Kendall]

Ok Tim, we can't all be as remarkable as the master.

They were stand-alone topics then...now they're chapters. Tally-Ho!

[Tim Green]

Sorry, wasn't trying to be a smartass -- but for the way HM handles this it's good to know that the only difference between a topic and a chapter is the presence of sub-topics. If you manually assign a chapter icon to a topic it will still be a topic, but with a chapter icon that never opens. It's generally better not to do that, because it may confuse users. They'll click on the book expecting it to open and when it doesn't they'll think that there are hidden topics in there that they can't access.