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elisa23592620fepw
Inspiring
March 15, 2022
Question

TOC in Robohelp

  • March 15, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 188 views

Hello everyone, I'm a new born user of Robohelp. With my comapny we decided to use Robohelp for managing user manual.Iwould therefore need to know if there is a way to manage, in a single TOC, several manuals, avoiding that the updating of one of them causes the mismatch of the others: Infact I noticed that the modification in the " Content" panel does not propagates automatically in TOC, so for each modification, I would have to autogenerate the TOC from the beginning, having to adjust the structure of all the documents from time to time.

Is there any way to avoid this?

If this is not possible, is it possible, by creating as many projects as there are manuals, perhaps merge them into a single master project, recalling the TOC of each, so as to avoid that the modification of one involves the mismatch of the order of the others?

Thanks so much!

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    2 replies

    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    March 15, 2022

    I hadn't mentioned merged help as I thought that might be a step too far for a new born. 🙂

     

    Merged Help (grainge.org) is described on my site. There you generate the parent and then the children into specific folders created when the parent is first generated. The child projects will not work standalone. For reasons explained in the various topics describing merged help, it is best to avoid any content in the parent in the RoboHelp sense of parent. It's best to create a child project to be thought of as big brother or big sister to the others.

     

    I'm not seeing an advantage and suspect if might be more work than it is worth. You would need multiple presets for each different merge plus to use a child project on its own you would need another preset for that to generate it outside the merge. That seems like as much work if not more than different TOCs in a single project. In a merge the TOCs for each project will be one after the other. You can point to a topic in one TOC that is in another project but that just adds to the complexity.

    ________________________________________________________

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

     

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    elisa23592620fepwAuthor
    Inspiring
    March 16, 2022

    Thanks so much Peter, very clear as ususal!

    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    March 15, 2022

    Much of the answer depends on whether there are common topics in the different manuals. If there are then it makes sense to use one project.

     

    The Contents Panel shows all the folders and topics in alphabetical order of the file names or topic titles, your choice but that's it. The TOC allows you to structure things how you want and in any output you need to add the topics that are to go into that build. The fact that a topic is in the Contents does not get it into the build.

     

    Your choices are different TOCs for the different outputs or having one TOC and then applying condition tags to the sections and topics. That allows you create a build expression that effectively says I have applied Expression One to the output so exclude any section or topic with say Tag One. That has the advantage of only having to add new topics to one TOC and keeping the structure consistent.

     

    On the other hand a separate TOC for each output shows exactly what will be created without having to think about the tags and expressions. For someone new, that might be easier.

    ________________________________________________________

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

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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    elisa23592620fepwAuthor
    Inspiring
    March 15, 2022

    Thank you very much Peter, very clear.

    I take this opportunity for another question: by inserting a child project, does it allow me in HTML 5 OUTPUT TO VIEW THE toc of the child project? I tried but I don't see it in output

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