How to edit RoboHelp TOC in a text editor

[RobioPro]

I work with a team that uses RoboHelp. I do some editing — but not enough to justify installing RoboHelp, et al — so I work with the raw HTML in a text editor.

We've recently added a TOC. But when I edit the TOC file, the changes do not appear on the actual pages.

For example, if I change...

<page navtitle="ARICLE TITLE" href="../path/article.htm" format="html" processing-role="normal"></page>

...to...

<page navtitle="ALTERNATIVE ARICLE TITLE" href="../path/article.htm" format="html" processing-role="normal"></page>

That new navtitle doesn't change on the actual page.

I'm hoping someone here can tell me what I'm missing here. Is there another file that I have to edit in tandem with the .toc file? Is there something in the CSS? Or am I just out of luck, and have to ask my teammates to make these edits for me — or download sevreal GB if intrusive software just to make this one edit?

Thanks!

[WoutJacobs]

That is probably because the navtitle of a page is non-existent, in the sense that the 'navtitle' always defaults to the html title. You cannot specify another title.

You can only edit the navtitle of a book.

Let's say you have the following TOC:

This has the following htm:

You can easily change section 1, section 2 by editing their navtitle.

You can also add a navtitle to Template FAQ, though I'm not sure if that is allowed. Template FAQ is a page (topic) that has been converted to a book (=section)).

Now, if you want to change how topics are displayed in the TOC (i.e., pages), you have to edit the actual topic title of the referenced htm file:

[Peter Grainge]

@WoutJacobs Whilst the TOC defaults to the topic title on creation, the titles can then be changed so that they are different titles. Perhaps because the author wants something shorter in the TOC.

Whilst the title can be changed in the HTML, normally it would be done via the Properties of the topic.

________________________________________________________

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

[RobioPro]

Thanks for the detailed reply...but the <page navtitle>s already don't match the <title>s of almost every page in our documentation.

For example ...

<page navtitle="Syncing Overview" ...>

...opens a page with the <title> of "Syncing and accessing data across devices"

So we're already overriding the <title>s

[Peter Grainge]

Topic title and topic heading are different things. Could that be a factor? 

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

[RobioPro]

Nope. Topic pages have matching <titles> and headers. Edits are taking place exclusively in the TOC, where almost every <page navtitle> is a shortened version of those titles/headers.

Having said that, the problem has mysteriously resolved itself — so mysteriously, in fact, that now I'm wondering if I just did something really stupid, like pull up the wrong branch in my browser after checking in the changes. I mean, I'm pretty sure I didn't do that, but I was working in the middle of the night (collaborators are 12 hours away), so I suppose it could have been a working-sleepy issue.

I'm just going to assume user error, *head-desk* myself and move on.

Thanks, @Peter Grainge.

[Peter Grainge]

Not surprisingly people who support this forum are regular RoboHelp users so we don't need back door methods and wouldn't have looked into them. We make changes using the TOC editor.

One thing you need to understand is that the title of a topic is not necessarily the same as the title in the TOC. They are different fields.

I think you would be better off to make the changes on a colleagues machine. If you change the title there, you will still need to change it in the topic.

________________________________________________________

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

[RobioPro]

Point taken. I just didn't know where else to ask. Not much RoboHelp discussion going on at Reddit or anywhere else. 🙂

The TOC's <page navtitle> being different from the target page's <title> is exactly what we're going for. I want to change only the <page navtitle> and not the topic's <title>. That's exactly what I did, editing the ____.toc file directly. But that edit literally didn't change anything. The TOC still renders with the previous <page navtitle> — which, again, didn't match the topic's <title> even before my edit. That's why I'm stumped.

[WoutJacobs]

After experiencing it for myself, I can confirm the issue. The page navtitle in a TOC is ignored even when editing it in the UI.

Instead, the output follows whatever value is in <h1>. The problem seems to occur when h1 does not directly follow body.

In my initial situation, the topic had the following structure:

<body>

  <h1>blablabla</h1>

</body>

When editing the page navtitle, the edited value was accepted by the TOC title.

However, I recently added a global div to each body in the 4000 topics of our project (to address yet another bug that I can't be bothered to explain):

<body>

  <div class="safeguard">

  <h1>blablabla</h1>

 ...

</div>

</body>

This disconnect between the body and the h1 seems to break the page navtitle functionality. So I think you should check in your topics if h1 directly follows body and if not, see if making it so will help your issue.

[Peter Grainge]

I'm still not clear here. 

 <h1>blablabla</h1> is the topic heading, nothing to do with the topic title or TOC.

This is the topic heading for the same topic.

On creation they all default to the same thing. Thereafter if you change the topic heading, nothing else changes.

The TOC can be set up to be independant or change when the Topic Title (not heading) changes.

________________________________________________________

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

[Peter Grainge]

Topic Title is whatever shows in Topic Properties.

In the TOC it defaults to being the same but in the TOC you can change it to whatever you want. Here an asterisk indicates it is no longer the same. To revert to the default you delete the text here and save. The default will then be reapplied.

Whether or not this helps the issue is another matter. 🙂

________________________________________________________

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

[WoutJacobs]

I believe PDF and Frameless work differently. I forgot to specify that this problem occurs only for PDFs.

Starting situation

Take a topic with an h1 'First Topic H1' and a topic title 'First Topic TITLE'. It is added to a TOC:

You publish it to PDF:

H1 appears to be used by default for PDF. Frameless probably uses topic title instead.

Navtitle edit

The navtitle gets edited in the TOC:

Publishing it leads to the expected result:

Navtitle edit 2

The same action is performed, only this time a div is placed between body and h1.

Publishing it now will result in the navtitle being ignored and H1 being used again, which may be the problem encountered by OP: