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Prateek_T1
Prateek_T1
Participating Frequently
October 3, 2013
Question

RH10 - Hyperlink an external pdf to chm file

  • October 3, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 3623 views

Hi,

I am Prateek, India. I am a technical writer & am working on RoboHelp. I am facing few issues with hyperlinks.

Let me straight away take to a scenario:

I have generated a chm file, name: "dynamic.chm" ( folder: D\Dynamic)

In this chm there are 3 links. viz: one.pdf, two.pdf, three.pdf ( folders random & each pdf is 50kb)

When I generated a chm file without giving hyperlinks, the size was 50kb.

I gave hyperlinks in a standard(robohelp -> create a project -> topic1 -> some text -> create hyperlink -> link to dropdown -> file -> select a pdf from a location) manner and generated chm output, the size was about 200kb.

My requirement: While having the chm size at 50kb, I need all the 3 hyperlinks to work fine. How can this be done?

Is there anyway where we can dynamically hyperlink the pdf files to the content?

As like in a word document, while giving hyperlink we provide "same folder", is there any option in RH? - I mentioned this because, we will be having a whole set of 100 documents in a single folder, and we will place the help file in the same folder. So, whenever a hyperlink is clicked, it must trigger the related .pdf file.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Regards,

Prateek Thungathurthy

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

RoboColum_n_
RoboColum_n_
Brainiac
October 3, 2013

Hi Prateek.

By linking to a PDF as you have, the file is added as a baggage file inside your project. That is why the CHM file increases. If you want to maintain the CHM size at 50kb you'll have to host the PDFs somewhere and hyperlink by adding a URL to them. That way the files are NOT part of the project.

Out of interest, why is 200kb such a big issue?

Prateek_T1
Prateek_T1Author
Participating Frequently
October 4, 2013

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

Got your point. But let me be more specific with the actual scenario.

We need to deliver a customer a set of files. These files are clubbed in a folder called "user". The user folder contains "300+ pdfs and 2 chms". Each chm has about 100 or so links to pdfs. We will add more links in future though.

These chms(when generated) should contain only the links, but not embedded, so that whenever I click on a link, it should pull the pdf from these 300+ pdfs. Can be be done? If yes, please let me know the process too.

*I am not sure how we give the "user" folder to the customer. It may be through a hard disk/server access/something else.

For now, we have the 'user' folder in SVN repository.

Second part, 200kb is really not a concerning factor, but that was just an example. our chms(embedded) have crossed 1.2gb already. We want to cut down the weight.

Regards.

RoboColum_n_
RoboColum_n_
Brainiac
October 4, 2013

In that case you have two choices:

  1. Package up the 300+ PDFs in the install together with the CHMs. The link path to the PDFs would just be <filename>.pdf. However this has the drawback that the link would be broken if the PDF or CHM were ever moved from their original location.

  2. Add a hyperlink to each PDF file. This adds each PDF as a baggage file and increases the CHM file size. It does have the advantage that you only need to install the two CHM files. As the PDFs are part of the CHM, you can forget about them.

Either way, the overall disk real estate would be about the same. Maybe option two would be less, especially if you use the file compression option in your single source layout.

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