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C
cloudwoman23
Known Participant
August 5, 2009
Answered

Links between .chm files

  • August 5, 2009
  • 1 reply
  • 3859 views

I knew I'd be back with some situation. When last I posted, about three months ago while testing conversion from hlp to chm, I had multiple .chms talking to each other. That was then, this is now. After rollovers to new versions of the help files and now doing chms for real, I can't get links from one file to another to work. (The merged TOC and index, however, work great.) I repeated the steps I did the first time and have reviewed again the many posts here on the subject of external links. Here's what I've done:

  • Merged the files in the master project TOC, then deleted the merge entries and merged again just to see if that would help
  • All chms are compiling to the SSL folder for the master project
  • Verified that all chms are in Baggage Files
  • Verified that the Merged Files section in the master project hhp lists only the chm file names with no paths
  • Compiled the master project in MS Help Workshop after merge (I read that you have to do that somewhere in Adobe's notes)
  • None of the chm files have underscores or special characters in their names
  • Deleted and regenerated the master project cpd and hhp files
  • Links from sub-chms to the master appear to be coded correctly with no specific location (example: winexp.chm::/Award_Year_g.htm)

These are large files with a lot of topics, but they're not complex mechanically. I'm using RH HTML 7. What am I missing here?

Thanks,

Beth

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Pete_Lees

Hi, Beth,

If you don't want to make the URL public, you can send me a private message via this site.

The error message may indicate that you haven't got the link syntax exactly right. For example, if your topics are stored in subfolders within the target Help file, your hyperlinks need to reflect this. So, a typical hyperlink might look like this:

<a href="ms-its:TargetHelpFile.chm::/TopicFiles/TheTargetTopic.htm">Click to view another topic</a>

To ensure that you're specifying exactly the right path information:

  1. Open the target Help file.
  2. Display the required topic.
  3. Right-click it and then, on the context menu, select Properties.


In the resulting properties sheet, you can copy the path information out of the Address field and trim it as necessary.

Pete

1 reply

P
Pete_Lees
Participating Frequently
August 6, 2009

Hi, Beth,

All of that sounds fine, except for the Baggage Files bit. The function of the Baggage Files feature is to nominate files that are to be compiled into your Help file, which is not something that you'd want to do in this instance.

What happens when you click a hyperlink from one Help file to another? Do you get an error mssage, or does nothing at all happen?

If you're willing briefly to post a couple of your .chm files on a file-sharing site like RapidShare, that would certainly help us to find the source of the problem quickly.

Pete

C
cloudwoman23Author
Known Participant
August 7, 2009

Pete,

Thanks much for the quick response.

I had read something about Baggage Files here somewhere and thought they are relevant, but it's good to know I can cross that off the list. I was going to delete the references to the chms in Project Manager just now and compile to see if it helped, but I can't see how to delete them, so I'll wait until you tell me what to do.

Sorry, I neglected to state the error message in my post. It's "This page cannot be displayed."

It would be great if you'd take a look at some of the files. Should I post the link here?

Beth

A
Amebr-ke0mH4
Inspiring
August 7, 2009

Importing the child chms into baggage is a long term RH "feature". If you want to merge, you can't stop robohelp doing it.However, we've found it causes problems with potentially compiling the chm files into the master chm, causing the following issues:

1. bloated file size

2. potentially including out of date chms in the help.

3. duplicate topic results in search - some of which show "cannot display page" messages

So once we have the merge set up, we delete the chm files out of the project root directory and delete permantently from source control (this is an option in Visual Source Safe - theoretically there are similar options in other source control applications).

This leaves "broken" baggage files in the Baggage Files list, but doesn't cause any problems with compiling. (If you need to set up your merging again, source control will have a few fits - you just need to manually add the files to the root folder and to source control again.)

I don't know if this will fix your issue, but it certainly won't hurt.

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