Participating Frequently

Question

(RH 2022 and beyond) Can I get merged HTML5 Help's Search to not search breadcrumb results?

Forum|Forum|20 days ago
May 28, 2026
3 replies
55 views

Hello RHelpers! I have returned! It’s been a while and it’s nice to see some familiar faces still around.

RH 2022+ using merged HTML5 output.

Background
The last several I moved over to a different role in our company. I was fortunate to be able to use some other tools Paligo, then MadCap Flare, etc. So, it’s been nice to expand my knowledge. I found there are things I really liked in Flare that weren’t in RoboHelp and things I really liked in RoboHelp 2017 and some things I didn’t like in either. But anyway… layoffs happened, and I got pushed back into my old role.

Anyway, we just converted our RH 2017 content (merged HTML5 help system with parent and 15+ child helps) the last couple of weeks from RH 2017 to the latest RH...whatever it’s called now. I’ll call it RH 2022. We’re slowly dealing with the fallout from that. In whole, the conversion went well. The topics converted great etc etc. We put things back together over the last couple of weeks. Our custom screenlayout that got converted behaves differently than it did so I’ve been crafting js scripts to put filtering etc back together the way merged HTML5 output and filtering used to work.

I’m just about there.

The Problem
Onto my main problem and by extension my question. In RoboHelp 2017 if we searched a phrase within double quotes, it’d do an exact search and only search within topic text. For example, searching for “Supported CMM Interfaces” in our RH 2017 generated output would appropriately return only 2 results. Searching for that same phrase in our RH 2022 generated output within quotes returns 508 results… That’s...umm… less than ideal. After some digging, I found out RH 2022 is a little expansive in its HTML5 search results and returns results from breadcrumbs from child topics! So, suppose the exact phrase is only used in in a book title, a topic heading of a book topic, and that book has hundreds of children topics, the search returns references to all those hundreds of children! And there doesn’t appear to be a way to say, “Hey, stay away from my breadcrumbs, greedy RH 2022 Search!”

Hence My Question
Can I get the generated merged HTML5 output Help's Search to not search breadcrumb results? I looked and don’t see a setting. How do you others get around this obvious limitation?

Thank you in advance!

html5 search

JaredHessAuthor

Participating Frequently

Just giving an update - I managed to duplicate this in a vanilla out-of-the-box project in RH 2026 and sent that to the tech comm support team.

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

So long since I have used Responsive, where are you adding breadcrumbs? Also which template?

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

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JaredHessAuthor

Participating Frequently

I just created a blank .htt template that I named standard.htt and then I added in the breadcrumbs from the UI. I applied that to all the topics in the output preset. In the TOC I created a topic with a unique heading. I then added multiple topics under that TOC section (ie book). Generated. In the output, I searched for the unique heading phrase in double quotes. Got one hit for every nested child in the TOC. Imagine having hundreds of subtopics. Search would give you hundreds of results while the actual phrase is just on that parent topic. From my vanilla project test. I should be getting only 2 results. I end up getting 12.

JaredHessAuthor

Participating Frequently

I’m in communication with tech comm suite support.
Also, the issue I guess is really a problem in Search in general for HTML5, not necessarily search in a merged help system. I tested it using an out-of-the-box Charcoal_Gray layout / skin and just published that one help to a completely different directory (ie no merged help), and it’s doing the same thing: I get the 508 results in RH 2026 vs the 2 results in RH 2017.

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

I thought it had gone quiet. :-)

There is no setting to that would affect that and I haven’t seen anyone post about it. Rather than assume that others are either living with it though, I do sometimes wonder if the use of merged help has dropped.

Frameless help gets more work done on it by Adobe so my first step would be to generate your whole merge as Frameless. I realised that call and so on would become an issue but nonetheless it would tell you if the issue is HTML5 only.

As always, it might also be worth flagging it with Adobe Support.

See https://helpx.adobe.com/contact/enterprise-support.other.html#robohelp for your Adobe Support options. The email link tcssup@adobe.com is recommended as it reaches a team dedicated to Technical Communication Suite products including RoboHelp.

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.

JaredHessAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thanks Peter! I’ll reach out to them and see what they say.

Regarding merged help, after the headache I’ve endured with Search, and the lengthy workaround I went through to get filtering etc. working the way it had on the TOC tab, had I not been around RH as long as I have, I likely would have dropped the merged help approach too for being bugged beyond repair…

But we have other systems that rely on the help output being the same for the moment. I may switch in the future, but it’s a large boat to move to get on a new course; so, for now, it’s full speed ahead into the choppy waters of the merged help storm front!

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