Can TOC contain hyperlinks to external docs?

[Guest]

WebHelp, RH9

Can I build a TOC that consists of a list of hyperlinks to external Word documents -- by which I mean Word docs not linked or imported into the project but instead, residing on a shared network drive in an intranet environment. When the user clicks the TOC entry, the Word doc would open either in the content pane or in a new browser window.

Thanks,

Mike

[RoboColum_n_]

Yes you can. Instead of adding a topic to your TOC, you add a page. These can be used to link to all sorts of things including URLs. You just need to add a "page title" and "link to" address (see below)

[PDF_Boy]

I've had a look and the 'link to' option does not include a word doc option. I also suspect you have to import docs into the project folder in order to link to them which Last Fudgement did not want to do.

[RoboColum_n_]

OK but the Word files are on an intranet. So you just link to them using a URL right?

[Peter Grainge]

Yes you can create a URL but it used to be the case that how that link worked depended on the user settings and the browser used. It will thus require some testing.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Captiv8r]

Hi all

In addition to what others have said, I'll also offer this. Even on a "fast" intranet, a Microsoft Word document can take a long time to open.

<Begin scratchy little old man voice here>

Sonny, back in the day when I was a young whippersnapper, when I was in the corporate world, I did the same thing myself. And because opening the document always took longer than most would reasonably expect, I developed a technique that I coined as "docfetch".

I created a separate page in my project for each link. Then linked the TOC to those pages. On the page itself I added some verbiage along the following lines: Please wait as your document is opened.

Then I configured this page to perform a meta redirect that opened the document a second or two later.

This caused the users to stop flooding my inbox to say things were "broke". Also, at that time RoboHelp had issues where it would lose the links to things like documents from the TOC. So it prevented that from happening too.

To configure a meta redirect, just add the following meta tag to your HTML:

<meta HTTP-EQUIV=refresh CONTENT="2;URL=G:\SomeFolder\SomeDocument.DOC">

Cheers... Rick

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