Renaming a topic file and re-titling a topic file in RH2019, Version 11

Thanks everyone!

To add to Peter's remark, I've tested some things and indeed, if you leave the TOC name empty, it becomes the file title. This makes syncing the TOC very easy. You can do it in 2 ways.

In the UI, one line at a time:

1. Open the TOC in the editor.
2. Make sure that the right pane is open.
3. Click on a TOC line in the editor.
4. In the right pane, triple-click in the Title field to select the whole line.
   BTW, triple-clicking to select a whole line works in many other applications too, for example, Word.
5. Press <Del> to delete the contents and then <Enter>.
6. The field will be filled in with the contents of the topic's title. 

In the TOC file, all at once:

1. Go to project folder\toc. There you can find all toc files. 
2. MAKE A BACKUP of the TOC file that you want to edit (just ctrl-c, ctrl-v). If things go wrong here, you may ruin the TOC completely.
3. Open the toc file with a text editor that can do find/replace with regular expressions, for example Notepad++. 
   The rest of these instructions assume that you use Notepad++.
4. In Notepad++, press Ctrl+H to open the Replace window.
5. In the bottom left, select Regular expression.
6. In the Find what field, enter
   <page navtitle="[^"]+"
7. In the Replace with field, enter
   <page
   This deletes the navtitle="any title text" part from the page entity.
8. Press Find Next a few times, to see if it actually finds wat you want to delete.
9. Press Replace once or twice, to see that the line that stays behind is correct and nothing weird happens.
10. If you're happy with the result, press Replace All.
11. Press Ctrl+S to save the file, and see RoboHelp filling in all the TOC lines with the topic titles.
12. Be happy.

If you want to know more about regular expressions, for example, what [^"]+ means,have a look at this article I posted on LinkedIn about it:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/regular-expressions-simple-overview-erwin-timmerman

Hope that helps.

Ah, nice. I didn't know that. Sometimes what you see as random behaviour is actually a feature 🙂

One other advice. If you're renaming topics and moving them around in bulk, make regular backups of your entire project, each time in separate files (like backup1.zip, backup2.zip, etc). I have found random files of mine become empty (0 kB) when I moved many pictures from one folder to another. I then had to restore the contents from an old output I made. Might not happen to you, but better safe than sorry.

Re the TOC name, see the RoboHelp Reimagined project or my RoboHelp Tour. In 2019 New UI you can keep the TOC and the Topic Title in sync or you can keep them independent.

I just tested the following and it works for me:

1. Right-click on a topic and select Properties.
2. Edit the filename and click Apply.

(oops, pressed Post too quickly)

Make sure you don't use any strange symbols. I'd stick to English letters, numbers, underscore and dash. (Avoid spaces too - while they are valid the can sometimes cause problems in online content).

The TOC has always been separate text that has to be updated manually. I regularly have cases where I don't want the TOC entry to match the topic title, so I personally would vote against moves to make them synchronise automatically. 🙂 However, it would be nice if there was a way you could sync if you wanted to.

You can report issues and request features here: https://tracker.adobe.com/