Fixed size topic pane

Report · Feb 24, 2009

Hello all. I am using RoboHelp 7 and my output is webhelp. If the user changes the width of the TOC it changes the size of the topic pane. This distorts information and makes tables espeically hard to read. If the user needs to change the sixe of the TOC I would like the topic pane to stay the same width and just have a scroll bar at the bottom. Can someone help me with this?

Report · Feb 24, 2009

Hi Sam

I can think of a couple of ways to accomplish this. Neither is particularly difficult but both will require hand tweaking each topic.

Method one: Use an invisible table
With this approach you basically select all the content in the topic and cut it to the Windows Clipboard. You then insert a single cell table and configure the width as desired. Then hide all borders so it doesn't show. Then paste the content back in.

Method two: Use some HTML code
With this approach you edit each topic to insert a DIV tag that sets the width of everything that follows. You would insert a closing DIV tag at the end of the topic.
Below is a sample:
</head>
<body>
<div style="width: 400px; position: fixed;">
Topic content here
</div>
</body>
</html>

Hopefully this helps... Rick

Report · Feb 24, 2009

Thanks Rick. Editing each topic individually is a daunting task considering I have thousands of topics. But I appreciate the advise. I guess I will just fix the ones with the particularly messy tables.

Report · Feb 24, 2009

I use a lot of tables. Try setting a table to "autofit to contents" (right-click in table and select autofit). Then play with the TOC width in the resultant CHM. The topic pane gets smaller but there are scroll bars.

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Fixed size topic pane