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James_K__Patrick
Inspiring
March 17, 2010
Question

Glossary sanity check requested

  • March 17, 2010
  • 1 reply
  • 852 views

Afternoon all,

RH 8.0.2 generating WebHelp.

After reading through dozens of forum postings on how to implement a glossary in RH8, I see there are generally 2 camps:

1. Use RH's built-in glossary feature

2. Roll-your-own in a separate topic with bookmarks to each letter of the alphabet

I'm working on a subject that has several acronyms. It also has terms that require fairly long definitions - longer than I'd like to show in an expanding hotspot.

So, here's what I've come up with - a combination of 1 and 2 above. Can someone please sanity check this and keep me from shooting myself in the foot, ankle, shin, knee, etc.?

1. Create a glossary (.GLO) and put just the acronyms in it. Run the Glossary Hotspot Wizard to create expanding text in each topic that has an acronym.

2. Create a glossary TOPIC listing ALL terms - acronyms and those needing longer definitions - add it to TOC.

3. Select the glossary on the first screen of the SSL for WebHelp.

4. Do NOT check the glossary box on the second screen of the SSL for WebHelp.

What I believe will happen is this:

1.  No glossary tab will display in the generated output.

2. Acronyms will appear as expanding hotspots.

3. The glossary topic will display in the TOC.

4. I can link non-acronym terms from topics to bookmarks for each non-acronym term in the glossary topic.

Downside: I will have to maintain acronym definitions in 2 places:

Upsides: I can use the Glossary Hotspot Wizard for acronyms. My longer definitions are no longer constrained to the limited space and styling allowed for definitions in the glossary tab.

Does that make sense? Or have I already loaded the gun?

Thanks for your brainpower,

Patrick

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1 reply

RoboColum_n_
RoboColum_n_
Legend
March 18, 2010

Ready! Aim!........

Actually that all sounds fine. If you only have one glossary file you don't actually have to specify the glossary in the first dialog of the WebHelp SSL. As it is the only one you can leave it to select the default file.

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MergeThis
MergeThis
Inspiring
March 18, 2010

Can an expanding hotspot contain a variable or snippet (I'm only putting it out there because I don't know, myself). Perhaps someone with experience in that area could chime in.

If it does, then you could eschew the GLO, create a variable or snippet for each entry, and manually add the variable or snippet to the expanding hotspots and to your "glossary" topic.

Good luck,

Leon

RoboColum_n_
RoboColum_n_
Legend
March 18, 2010

Wow Leon! That got me thinking it was a starter so I tested it. The issues are that DHTML expanding hotspots created by the glosary wizard are non-editable other than by rerunning the wizard. Also variable names can not contain any spaces (only alphanumeric characters). Whilst this itself is not so much of an issue so long as the variable value is equal to the definition, it could make for a fairly difficult list of variables especially if there are loads of definitions.

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