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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
  • 3624 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_
Legend
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.

Captiv8r
Captiv8r
Legend
October 4, 2013

Hi there

As we are talking about CHM files here, I like to use the HTML Help Shortcut control to open external files. You just supply the file name of the PDF as the target for the control. That way the PDF may be kept outside of the CHM if you want.

The only real side effect is a phenomenon that happens with CHM files when they are linked to the application. You may find that the actual folder that the help "sees" has changed, due to the way the developers have linked the CHM. And that's why we find folks using the JavaScript outlined at the link below to accomplish this.

Click here to view

Cheers... Rick

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