TOC not in numerical order (RH7)

[GeoTipton]

My client wants the section numbers from his user manual left in (not stripped out) so that they show up in the help topics. In my Project Manager tab, the topics for the imported chapter files are in the correct numerical order, but in the auto-generated TOC they are hopelessly mixed up. Also, several of the numbers seem to be overwritten with "IX". What a useless mess!

[Captiv8r]

Welcome to our community

If you want a Table of Contents that is laid out exactly as you see it in the Project Manager pod, create a totally new one that is blank. Then just click and drag topics from the Project Manager pod to the TOC pod.

Not sure what to advise on the IX issue.

Cheers... Rick

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[GeoTipton]

Thanks so much for your response! So you're saying that, instead of the tool auto-creating a TOC which simply mirrors the Project Manager tab, I have to drag over 300 individual topics one by one to get the order I need. That seems so lame. Oh well, I guess I'll start dragging.

[Captiv8r]

Sorry, but yes that's the way it works. At least in that version of RoboHelp and earlier. I believe RoboHelp 8 changes this and allows creating a TOC that mirrors the Project Manager pod. Assuming you are using the ability of the pod to order topics as you want.

If you want to clear the TOC and display the Topic List (View > Pods > Topic List) you can sort the Topic List as you want, then select all the topics inside and drag them to the TOC to easily create the TOC.

Maybe that will be simpler for you.

Cheers... Rick

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[GeoTipton]

Thanks for the tip. When I open the Topic List it only shows 15 topics, about one for every chapter, as if only the Heading 1's were used for creating the topics. (I took a picture of the screen, but didn't see any way to attach it.) I don't know how there could be so few topics in the list. When I imported the chapters I specified multiple headings upon which to base the topics. And the TOC shows hundreds of what appear to be topics, as does the Project Manager tab. I'm ready to give up and turn the whole job over to someone else.

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

When you import topics you get to choose whic heading levels are paginated into topics. Likely you are seeing that bookmarks have been inserted and the resulting TOC is being created based on bookmarks as well as topics.

As for screen captures, when you are replying using the web interface you see a camera icon that you may click to insert an image.

Cheers... Rick

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[GeoTipton]

Thanks for the tip about image insertion. And I think you are absolutely

right about the bookmarks. I understand that topics are created from the

heading levels that I specify--that's what I am doing. I have created large

help projects for years usng X5 and have not had the problems RH7 is

presenting. I now strongly suspect that it is a template issue. Two of the

Heading styles that RH7 presents for topic creation have aliases ("Heading

4,Map Level" and "Heading 5,Block Level"). The Heading 4 and Heading 5

styles in my importing documents DO NOT. The aliased Heading styles are

ghosts of an old IMI template that my company used long ago, and at times

they mysteriously haunt me, maybe because I never deleted them from my

Templates (MS Word's) folder. Has anyone ever run into such a problem with

RH, where the Heading styles presented for topic creation are picked up from

an old tempate rather than from the imported document? On Monday I'm going

to clean out my Templates folder because I know that it has some very old RH

and IMI .dot's in it. This would also explain why others in my company who

use RH7 aren't having the same problem; they don't have the same junk in

their Templates folder.

[GeoTipton]

Cleaning out the old junk from the Templates folder helped only in that now RH7 no longer presents the aliased Heading styles, which is good because the files I am importing don't have any aliased styles. But it didn't solve my main problem which is that topics only appear to be created from Heading 1 even though I have checked the checkboxes for several others of the Heading styles. From what I have gathered from Rick, RH7 then creates bookmarks for the other Heading styles, and then creates topics from them. I have no use for this bookmarking and don't know how to prevent it from happening. I only want topics to be generated from the set of Heading styles in the importing documents so that I can sort the topics in the Topic list and then drag the sorted list (by section number) into the TOC.