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raylangivens
raylangivens
Known Participant
May 17, 2016
Answered

Topics display expanded glossary text as the default

  • May 17, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 1257 views

I have a WebHelp project created with RoboHelp 2015. I am having trouble with glossary text automatically expanding without clicking a glossary term in a topic. This appears to be associated with the Search feature. For example:

  1. Open the WebHelp output in IE or Chrome.
  2. In the Search box, type in a term or phrase (for example, "Agent")
  3. Click any of the topics returned by the search.
  4. Any topic that has a glossary term automatically displays the expanded glossary text.

This should not be happening. When you open a topic, regardless of whether you found it via search, the TOC, or whatever, glossary terms should not automatically display the expanded glossary text. You should have to click the term to display the expanded text.

Has anyone run into this issue? Any suggestions for how to fix it?

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Willam van Weelden

Are all glossary texts expanded? Or only the ones that contain search words found in the search?

The second scenario is as designed. If the reader searches for a word and goes to the page, RoboHelp will highlight all occurances. Also the ones in a dropdown. Not doing this can be confusing for your reader as they may not see the word they were searching for.

You can also disable search highlighting. That should stop the behaviour as well.

1 reply

Willam van Weelden
Willam van WeeldenCorrect answer
Inspiring
May 21, 2016

Are all glossary texts expanded? Or only the ones that contain search words found in the search?

The second scenario is as designed. If the reader searches for a word and goes to the page, RoboHelp will highlight all occurances. Also the ones in a dropdown. Not doing this can be confusing for your reader as they may not see the word they were searching for.

You can also disable search highlighting. That should stop the behaviour as well.

raylangivens
raylangivensAuthor
Known Participant
May 21, 2016

Hi Willam,

It's only the glossary entries that contain the words you searched for and found in the search. Thank you for clarifying how expanding glossary text works. We can live with it. Disabling search highlighting isn't an option. If you're searching on a term, open a long topic with that term and the term isn't highlighted, there was no point in searching for it.

That said, My Doc colleagues and i think the way RH handles expanding glossary items is a poor design. If you search on an entry such as "Agent," and open a topic that has an Agent entry in the glossary, that entry doesn't expand because you don't use the word "Agent" to define an Agent. So far so good. The problem is that any other glossary terms in the topic that reference "Agent" get expanded. For example, if the topic with the Agent glossary item also has a glossary item called "Data Loss Prevention" that references the word "Agent," the "Data Loss Prevention" item gets expanded (and probably confuses the user). IMO, glossary entries should only be expanded when you click them.

Willam van Weelden
Willam van Weelden
Inspiring
May 30, 2016

I would suggest submitting a feature request with Adobe for this: Home  Give them a reference to this thread.

Here is how to solve the issue so Glossary Hotspots are not expanded by default:

  1. In your output, open the file whtopic.js with a text editor such as Notepad++.
  2. Go to line 339. It will look like this:
else if((tagname == "span" && parent.className == "expandtext") ||                (tagname == "span" && parent.className == "glosstext")
  1. Remove the option for glosstext:
else if((tagname == "span" && parent.className == "expandtext"))
  1. Save the file.

The auto expand is now disabled. If you want this behaviour to automatically be in place whenever you generate, you will also have to modify the seed file in a similar manner.

The seed file is: C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe RoboHelp 2015\RoboHTML\WebHelp5Ext\template_stock\whtopic.js

Same line nubers.

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