Search work in glossary

[pigzrus]

When I post and try to search for a term I know is included in the Glossary, the topic does not show up in Search -- it says there are no entries. Example, I search for "ADG" which is entered with a definition in the Glossary, and Search responds, "No Topics Found." Should the Search and Glossary functions talk to each other? If so, how can I get them to introduce themselves? Thanks!

[RoboWizard]

Hi pigzrus and welcome to our community

Is the term you are referring to ONLY located in the Glossary? And is your Glossary ONLY being used as a Glossary tab (.CHM Help) or a Glossary pane (WebHelp) If so, I'm not sure how you would coax the resulting help system to "find" it. Normally a search occurs only across topic content. The glossary is treated totally differently. Think of it like this. You have a car with contents inside where the passengers sit. Your glossary is in the trunk. If you want to search the car, you normally simply look through the passenger area and don't bother with the trunk. Might be a bad analogy, but I tried.

Cheers... Rick

[pigzrus]

Thanks for the help, Rick! The term appears only in the Glossary and we have the WebHelp version. I'm kind of assuming from your answer that the Search function would not look in the Glossary (trunk); we would just have to make sure the user is told that if it's not in Search, they should look in the Glossary. Is this correct? Again, thanks!

[RoboColum_n_]

Thats the long and the short of it.

[MergeThis]

An alternative is to create a topic called Glossary and put all terms and descriptions in there. Copy the text from the projectname.GLO file and use styles (bold for the term, regular indented for the description). You can add a button (or text), either in the toolbar or in a topic template, to link to that topic.

If you want to retain the info that the "class=glossterm" provides, you could manually create tooltips with the ACRONYM tag (see the sample code). Assign a style for that tag in your CSS (background color, font size, etc.), and you're good to go!

We went this route because we have a huge merged Webhelp project with 42 projects and seven authors, and we wanted to reduce the chance of errors throughout the life of the project. This way, there's one file that I maintain in the parent project, and I don't worry about one or more authors not running the Glossary Hotspot Wizard on their child projects.

Although this method requires a fair amount of work initially, it will certainly provide the

Good luck,
Leon