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Question

Numbering in TOC

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
February 28, 2022
7 replies
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Hello Community,
I just finished off the Test-Version of Adobe RoboHelp and there are 2 things I couldnt solve which are essential for the desicion of purchasing it.

1. What we need in our technical documentation is a numbered TOC, which also shows up the Numbers on the TOC Page. For exmple something like this:

Im not looking for the explanation now how I can do it, I just need to know is it possible, and if yes, how easy its done? As for me it seemed very complicated to set such "essential" things for a documentation.

2. How are you guys working with pictures? As we used Microsoft Word, we often worked with numbered symbols on pictures to lead the reader to the right section of a picture. The only thing I saw in RoboHelp was the Imagemaps.. but therefore I couldn't make, for example the circle, which links to the topic, to appear on the picture itself, which isnt actually useful as a reader - especially when its a printed document.

The Picture below is an example how we used to describe machine parts. I propably need a additional tool for that or I just create the pictures in Word and then import them in my RoboHelp Project, but thats actually not the most satisfiyng way to do it, isnt it? 🙂

I guess if I have answers for these 2 questions, I can cover more or less all the requirements we have for a new tool to create the documentations, and Im pretty sure there needs to be a clever way to handle it.

Looking forward to your answers.

Best Regards
Michel

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Peter Grainge

Community Expert

I have contacted Adobe about this issue. The title you see in the TOC is taken from the topic title when the topic is created. At that stage the topic is not connected to the CSS and that is what drives the numbering, thus it is not possible for the TOC to automatically show any numbering.

You can right click any entry in the TOC and select Properties. There you can prefix the title with a number and click Apply. The number will then be shown. The Topic Title in Topic Properties will not be changed automatically by design, sometimes users want the two to be different.

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Michel1432Author

Participant

Good morning Peter,

Thanks alot for you effort - I will certainly find a way to handle it.

Regards

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

FM is indeed the better tool for long-form technical docs - it came out of the book publishing industry and creates great looking PDFs with auto-updated cross-references and auto-numbering. It's ability to also generate HTML5 has improved a lot over the last few versions, but for greater control I still go the import route into RH to produce my online help. Getting Word docs into FM can be done in a couple of ways - the cleanest is a simple copy/paste and then apply your styles (called tags in FM) to the content. You can also directly import well-formed Word docs (styles used & no inline styles) into FM and they will create the corresponding FM tags out of the Word styles.

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

@Jeff_Coatsworth is more qualified to answer that. Fm would give you its own printed output and for HTML5 you could generate that by using the RoboHelp integration. It therefore seems the sensible mix.

What i think @Jeff_Coatsworth can tell you is how easy it will be to get your Word documentation into Fm.

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

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Peter Grainge

Community Expert

As far as I can see, none of the outputs allow RoboHelp to be set up with numbering in the TOC with one exception. In the Word output you can map to a Word template. You can set up that template so that it has a numbered TOC. I haven't tested it to prove that but I'm pretty sure it would work.

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Michel1432Author

Participant

Do you think, if we are publishing most of our documents in paper form, FrameMaker would make more sense for creating them? and RoboHelp merely used for specific outputs like html5?

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

I think it would be possible in a Word output but I would need to check, which I cannot do right now. The initial answer as far as online is concerned is that it is not possible and that would be true of an online TOC from a FrameMaker input. That is being checked. In other words, subject to testing you can have numbering in your topics and Word output but not an online TOC.

Is the numbering just there so that you can refer to it and saved as one image? If so that will not be a problem to import. RoboHelp doesn't have an image editor. Snagit is the recommended tool and that has an option to click in one spot and it will apply the number 1, then click again somewhere else and 2 will be applied automatically.

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Michel1432Author

Participant

For Online I guess it will be fine without having numbered TOC as its pretty easy to get what you are looking for, but if we have documentations with about 300 pages on paper, its way easier to navigate through the docs with having numbered TOC.

for the Image:
Yes, thats sounds like the direction I want to go, will give it a try.

Thanks for your support

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Is this for an online output or Word or PDF. I am assuming it is for online.

You can add autonumbering to the heading styles that will give you what you want in the topics. However, that does not come through in the TOC and I don't think it is possible to add the numbering there. I have asked an Adobe contact to confirm that.

Even if it were you would hit a problem if not all the topics are to be shown in the TOC. There would be gaps.

As far as the topics are concerned, when you create one the numbering will default to 1 but you can force it to whatever you want. That become a problem when you want to insert a new topic between say 10 and 11 and you have 100 topics. You will manually have to change everything from from 11 onwards.

So technically part of what you want to do is easy but fraught with problems.

The point to think about is numbering stems from the days of printed books when you had to provide a way of telling a reading how to get to specific point. With hyperlinks that is no longer needed. Click the TOC title and you go to the topic, you don't need a number.

RoboHelp will not import from Word images that are made up of many images. Image maps are what you need here. See if this helps. Image Maps

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Michel1432Author

Participant

Thanks for your answer.

regarding TOC:
The Problem is, we still publish alot of our technical documentations in paper form (as it is required to deliver the instruction manuals on paper according to the machine guidelines of the EU, depending on the customer and so on).
So in this case, it would be very helpful to have a numbered TOC Page, so you can refer to numbers and not the topic titles (as Jeff said, in FM this should be possible, so I might think about purchasing the techcommsuite so I can work with both, RH and FM) - but I have to say, Im a bit dissappointed that it needs that "much" effort, and is not made by click (or formatting once, and then automatically adjust it).

For the Pictures:
We are actually not really editing pictures, we just like to put numberings on it so you can refer from a paragraph to the section in the picture (no hyperlinks, just a visual help). This could look like this:
"- To move the Gripper (1), adjust the throttles vavles (2)" and then you have the numbering on the specific part on the picture.

Of course, with CSS this will be possible as well - but I actually very enjoyed the way it was made in MSWord, so you can just drag and drop symbols on top of a picture and group all together so its stays together. Maybe there is a better way then reffering them into RH projects? Maybe with an additional Adobe Tool?

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

1. The numbering in your TOC would come from the numbers you place in your topic headers.

2. Not quite sure what you are wanting to do with images - yes, you would create them outside of RH and import them by reference into your RH project. But you can use the Image map feature to create hotspots to link to topics or you could create a table to list all your callouts. Usually that's a better way if there's localization involved.

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

@Jeff_Coatsworth I tried applying numbering to headings and that worked but it does not come through to the TOC.

________________________________________________________

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

Use the menu (bottom right) to mark the Best Answer or Highlight particularly useful replies. Found the answer elsewhere? Share it here.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

Really? That's interesting - I wonder why they would strip that off.

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