How to select multiple pages to appear at one time?

[disneeprincess]

Hi,

I'm using RH7 and generating WebHelp.

I finally have my first RH project on a server, so I am still very new at RH. Now I have a request from a co-worker for the ability to select multiple pages of a book to appear in the right-hand portion of the screen. We'd like to be able to print or capture the information for a section - rather than having to print or copy each page. I hope I'm making this request clear. I'll give an example: Book A has page A-1, A-2, and A-3. We want the flexibility to see page A-1 in right-hand portion when we click on it in the table of contents....and we would like the option to select pages A-1, A-2, and A-3 to appear in the right-hand portion all together as well. Is there a way to do this??

Thanks for any comments,

Julie

[Captiv8r]

Hi Julie

There are different ways to coax multiple pages to display simultaneously. Unfortunately, allowing the end user to choose which pages is a bit on the probmematic side.

I suppose one way would be to create a frameset that lists different pages. The issue there is that you would have to know beforehand which pages the user wants.

Another way would be to insert some Inline Frames into a page. Again, the issue would be in knowing beforehand which pages the user wants.

One way you might overcome this would be to link into each frame of the inline frame or frameset, a topic that has nothing but links to all the other topics. Then the user would be able to click the links to display the desired pages.

So assuming you got that to work as you wish, you then encounter another huge issue. You will then likely struggle with the appearance of the printed output that is produced after printing something intended for on-line presentation.

Typically when you want to provide print, you supply a PDF version of the help. The user opens the PDF and prints from that.

Cheers... Rick

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[disneeprincess]

Hi Rick,

Thanks so much for your advice. I have been researching frames since I haven't used them before. I would like to keep things very simple since I am so new to RH. Based on your comments, I thought of creating a topic for each book has all of the pages in that book. On the first page of each book, I would have a link that says 'Click here to see all pages in this book.' I would have to copy the contents of each page manually when I create the topic. I can see that it could become a maintenance problem if I do it this way. (Every time I make a change, I would have to copy that change to the topic.) Does this approach seem impractical and not professional?

Thanks for helping me think thru this problem!

Julie

[Peter Grainge]

Is this something that your co-worker wants for their benefit or for the users? Personally I think the idea sounds horrible. How many pages of a book do you read at a time?

If there is good reason that you agree with then maybe AIR Help would be close. With certain templates, users can have different topics open in different tabs. Maybe as you are new to RH you don't want to go there yet. If you do, RH8 is better but try it on a different machine to your production machine.

There's an article on my site about with some screenshots so that you can see what it looks like.

---

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[disneeprincess]

Unfortunately, our current 'homemade' help system works this way. In our system, if you click a heading in the table of contents, then everything underneath it appears in the view pane. Our support team uses it to grab chunks of the help and copy them to Word and then send it to a user who is asking about a certain topic. Our users can also do this.

Because the current system works this way, I've been asked to make RH work this way. Sorry I didn't explain the situation more clearly from the start. I am a bit rattled and sad to find out that my big project doesn't fit all of our needs, and I am just trying to find a workaround solution that won't create any problems.

Thanks for your suggestions. I would be lost without this forum, and I appreciate everyone's time.

Julie

[Peter Grainge]

So Support send extracts from the help rather than teaching the user to locate it. If you look in Snippets you will see ways in which they can send the user links to the help.

Your home brew sounds like something that was done because no recognised HAT works that way. I wonder why.

Maybe it's time to rethink how the whole process works?

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

Follow me @petergrainge

[disneeprincess]

Thank you for your comments and directing me to Snippets. I will talk to my colleague and see how we can use the email link instead of copying and pasting information.

Thanks,

Julie