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disneeprincess
Known Participant
November 9, 2009
Question

How to select multiple pages to appear at one time?

  • November 9, 2009
  • 1 reply
  • 1135 views

Hi,

I'm using RH7 and generating WebHelp.

I finally have my first RH project on a server, so I am still very new at RH. Now I have a request from a co-worker for the ability to select multiple pages of a book to appear in the right-hand portion of the screen. We'd like to be able to print or capture the information for a section - rather than having to print or copy each page. I hope I'm making this request clear. I'll give an example: Book A has page A-1, A-2, and A-3. We want the flexibility to see page A-1 in right-hand portion when we click on it in the table of contents....and we would like the option to select pages A-1, A-2, and A-3 to appear in the right-hand portion all together as well. Is there a way to do this??

Thanks for any comments,

Julie

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Captiv8r
Captiv8r
Legend
November 10, 2009

Hi Julie

There are different ways to coax multiple pages to display simultaneously. Unfortunately, allowing the end user to choose which pages is a bit on the probmematic side.

I suppose one way would be to create a frameset that lists different pages. The issue there is that you would have to know beforehand which pages the user wants.

Another way would be to insert some Inline Frames into a page. Again, the issue would be in knowing beforehand which pages the user wants.

One way you might overcome this would be to link into each frame of the inline frame or frameset, a topic that has nothing but links to all the other topics. Then the user would be able to click the links to display the desired pages.

So assuming you got that to work as you wish, you then encounter another huge issue. You will then likely struggle with the appearance of the printed output that is produced after printing something intended for on-line presentation.

Typically when you want to provide print, you supply a PDF version of the help. The user opens the PDF and prints from that.

Cheers... Rick

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D
disneeprincessAuthor
Known Participant
November 10, 2009

Hi Rick,

Thanks so much for your advice. I have been researching frames since I haven't used them before. I would like to keep things very simple since I am so new to RH. Based on your comments, I thought of creating a topic for each book has all of the pages in that book. On the first page of each book, I would have a link that says 'Click here to see all pages in this book.' I would have to copy the contents of each page manually when I create the topic. I can see that it could become a maintenance problem if I do it this way. (Every time I make a change, I would have to copy that change to the topic.) Does this approach seem impractical and not professional?

Thanks for helping me think thru this problem!

Julie

Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
November 10, 2009

Is this something that your co-worker wants for their benefit or for the users? Personally I think the idea sounds horrible. How many pages of a book do you read at a time?

If there is good reason that you agree with then maybe AIR Help would be close. With certain templates, users can have different topics open in different tabs. Maybe as you are new to RH you don't want to go there yet. If you do, RH8 is better but try it on a different machine to your production machine.

There's an article on my site about with some screenshots so that you can see what it looks like.

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

Follow me @petergrainge

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