Create a welcome page

I am now told that the default topic is a special case and that it will be in the build regardless of whether or not it is in the TOC. The Adobe documentation and the About RoboHelp sample project will be revised.

@elisa23592620fepw Sorry this thread got confusing but I was going on what the RoboHelp help stated.

@KarenMinOR Glad you posted your solution that brought this issue out.

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My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

I have queried this with Adobe as the online help also states all topics must be in the TOC. I will post their response in due course.

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My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

The default topic does appear without it being in the TOC. That is not what Adobe told me so I will query that. It's the same in frameless.

In both cases though, if the user clicks Home in the breadcrumbs, they will go back to the default topic which in the @elisa23592620fepw project is the welcome page. @elisa23592620fepw that must be what happens in your project, please confirm.

So the answer to @elisa23592620fepw about the welcome page not showing in the TOC is I don't think you can achieve what you want within RoboHelp. You could create a web page using some other tool that would then open the help via a link. Whilst your welcome page can be hidden/excluded from the TOC, the breadcrumbs will find it.

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My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

@KarenMinOR I got interrupted with my reply so I didn't see your post, apologies.

In theory your Step 1 is wrong as a requirement for any build it everything has to be in the TOC. I will test later as that is what is stated in one of the sample projects and should be what is in the help. It's certainly what has been drilled into me by the Adobe guys.

What I am thinking is it is working for you be because of a link from some topic in your project, such topics do then get included. However, if @elisa23592620fepw's project does not have such a link, it might fail.

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My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

The welcome page would just be another topic that you set as the default topic. it has to be the default as you would want it to be the first page the user sees. It does have to be in the TOC to be part of the build. However, it can be hidden so the user does not see it. See the Properties in the TOC entry for the welcome page and select Hide in Output. In the topic properties you can exclude it from the search.

With that said, is it a good idea? After the user has viewed some topics, they might want to go back to the start. Without that being in the TOC, how will they do that? I'm not saying it's wrong, just you need to think about it.

You say you have just started a project, does that mean you are a new user? I ask as the frameless outputs are a better way to go. Going forward Adobe will be focussing development on frameless outputs so I recommend considering frameless templates for your project. Also they have an optional home page that has tiles to represent the top level sections of your TOC. It has some default Welcome text.

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My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.