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Christine301653386cjz
Known Participant
September 25, 2025
Question

RoboHelp 2022: Prevent TOC books from opening automatically

  • September 25, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 387 views

Hello.  Is there a way to prevent TOC books from opening automatically when you open a topic in a Responsive HTML5 output?

 

We have topics that are located in multiple books in the TOC.  In previous versions of RoboHelp, if you opened a topic from another topic, it did not change where you were in the TOC.   With the 2022 output, it takes you to the first book in the TOC where this topic is located.  We have our books organized by teams, so that isn't always appropriate.

 

For example, topic A is located in the TOC under the Team 1 book and the Team 2 book.  You're in team 2 and you've opened topic B from the Team 2 book.  Topic B has a link to Topic A, you click on it, and the TOC opens to the location of Topic A in the Team 1 book.  This is confusing and frustrating for team B.


Is there a way to prevent it from doing this and have the TOC books not change at all when you click on one topic from another, similar to how it used to work in RoboHelp 2017?

 

thanks!

Chris

    1 reply

    Jeff_Coatsworth
    Community Expert
    Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    September 25, 2025

    I think you avoid that by using Snippets that hold the content that appears in separate topics as containers for the snippet. In your example, the content of topic A is in a snippet; the Team 1 book has an empty topic A that holds the snippet A content, and the Team 2 book has an container topic (topic A) that also has the snippet A content. Links to the respective Team topics point to the respective containers.

    C
    Christine301653386cjzAuthor
    Known Participant
    September 25, 2025

    I can't even imagine how long it would take to do that across the entire projects.  There are so many topics that are shared.  And then if the title changes for that content, now it has to be changed in each of the empty topics as well? Rather than just being changed once and automatically updated in the TOC.  And it would increase the number of topics by a lot; maybe even double it because some topics are shared by 3, 4, or 5 teams.

     

    If we could just prevent the TOC from changing at all, that would be so much better.  And it would be nice even in cases where other teams weren't involved.  Users often have a book open and want to stay there, which is how it used to work.

     

    I suppose we could change the links to open in a new window instead, but there are cases where we really don't want to do that.

    Jeff_Coatsworth
    Community Expert
    Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    September 26, 2025

    "And then if the title changes for that content, now it has to be changed in each of the empty topics as well?" - no, of course not, that's the whole point of snippets - you edit the snippet & the changes appear everywhere that snippet is used. 

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