Build Tags & Table of Contents

[three_penguins]

I'd like to be able to vary the table of contents using build tags. For example "topic A" should appear in 2 different .chm files, let's call them help1.chm and help2.chm. I'd like "topic A" to appear in the table of contents for both .chm files, but want the table to have a different hierarchy. In other words help1.chm may have a table of contents with "topic A" 3 levels deep, while help2.chm might have "topic A" at the top level of the table of contents. Any ideas?

[RoboColum_n_]

Off the top of my head there are two options. First involves using an alternate TOC file which you can specify in the advance properties of your project's window. Another option is to have two projects with one using a redirect topic linked to the topic in the other project - thus avoiding maintenance of two topics. Which one you use probably depends on the number of topics that need to be mirrored between the two TOCs. You can download Rick Stone's Tips and Tricks to see how redirect topic work.

[three_penguins]

Thanks Colum. The alternate table of contents idea seems to work well. Took me a while to figure it the proper way to do it. The key thing was manually adding the .hhc file to the project as a "baggage file". I only wish there were a way to toggle back and forth between the main table of contents and the alternate one for editing purposes.

[Captiv8r]

Hi Esch

You may also want to investigate the following link that explains a way to customize the TOC using a combination of Build Tags and redirect topics.

Click here to read the article

Cheers... Rick

[three_penguins]

Thanks Rick - RoboWizard.com certainly is a good resource. I see the advantage to using redirects is that you could more easily edit the toc and index, however, when you're in RoboHelp designing things every toc and index entry would appear - which could be a bit confusing since that's not really how it would look in the compiled version. The advantage to using alternate .hhc and .hhk files is a clear separation, but it's certainly more difficult to edit the alternate files. Truly it is a trade off. Both approaches work but neither is ideal.

My suggestion to Adobe for a future release of RoboHelp would be the ability to maintain multiple toc and index files within a single project and assign build tags to them. Then, when editing toc and index within RoboHelp you could select the toc or index file on which you wanted to work. This would be similar to the way you can define multiple "windows" with different properties. The approach I'm taking right now is to have a different "window" for each build tag with alternate toc files assigned to each window.