Is it possible - and not horribly complicated - to add separator lines or some empty spaces in WebHelp Table of Contents?
I would like to group the "books" and top level topics, separating them somehow, but adding empty items or simple HTML like <br> or <hr> in the .hhc file is not doing anything.
This is what the graphics designer is asking for:
I am running RH7 and using a somewhat adjusted version of the "Default" skin.
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Replies
Thanks Willam.
That works, except it does not quite do what I really want to do 
Adding something like "{border-top:"+gsABgColor+" 1px solid; " adds a border but it does it everywhere where that style is applied.
What I am asked to do is group some of the main level "books" together, so I'd have to be able to determine exactly where the separators go and where not.
It is not the end of the world if accomplishing this is too tricky. I am not going to do something I'd have to do manually in 34 languages...
Hi Willam
I'm guessing that what is meant is something like this:
I'm wondering why someone couldn't just insert a page that links to a specific and innocuous topic and configure the TOC with a string of dashes or whatever. In this case it would look like this:
Cheers... Rick
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That is the idea Rick.
With the Default skin, the problem would be that there'd still be an icon in the row with the separator.
BUT
In my modded skin I have a blank icon for topics, so it looks almost good. And the link can point to the next help topic down the list.
There's still a few niggles there:
- clicking those links opens the topic but it does not expand the ToC to the real ToC item
- the highlight for "active" topic always returns to the first item that has the string of dashes (not visible in the screenshot)
- the hover style looks a bit silly (underlined green string of dashes in the screenshot)
- the tooltip (?) with a string of dashes looks a bit silly too... (my mouse cursor did not show in the pic)
- we are using breadcrumbs in the topics, and the string of dashes shows there too...
It would be even better if I could get RH and Help to accept the string of dashes without a functional link. If I don't have a link in the ToC item, it does not appear in the finished Help.
Note:
This thing is primarily cosmetic: nice to have. But I guess grouping the items would also be a slight usability improvement.
Next:
Green hover color and grey highlight for "selected" still appear.
In IE7 nothing else happens but Firefox complains that the URL is not valid and cannot be loaded...
in the .hhc file the code looks like this:
<li><object type="text/sitemap">
<param name="Name" value="____________________________">
<param name="Local" value="http:">
</object>
Not sure if this would help, but there is the Remote URL option in the Navigation tab of the Skin Editor (see Rick's "Nothing appears over there" link in his screenshot). This generally goes unused, but you might be able to hijack it for your purposes.
If you link it to a blank topic that redirects to the first page in the next group, that might work. What's unclear to me, since I've never actually used it, is whether you can use it multiple times in the same TOC. Rick might know. Actually, you could also look at the "Using additional page images in the TOC" in his Skinny on Skins tutorial. I use several images myself (for PDF, TXT, etc.) but you could try using the same image but with different file names to set things up in the whthost.js output file (which needs to be saved externally and used to replace the one that gets produced each time you Generate WebHelp).
But hey, you've got plenty of time on your hands to try it out, don't you? 
Good luck,
Leon
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