X6 problems with popups - missing images

Harvey: Thanks for all of the great information. I appreciate it.

Regards,
Lana

Alas, the RH 6 hyperlink dialog for auto- and custom-sizing popups lists .htm files and bookmarks only. As you have discovered, you can use the "Display in frame" feature, specify a new window, and you get your popup. But you lose the click-close feature. The user has to click the "X."

I'd like to make a couple of points.

1. Direct placement of any file into the project's Windows directory deprives RH of the "knowledge" that the file is part of the project. When you insert a link to the file, RH adds it to the project list.

2. You can import images as baggage files, and RH will keep track of them in the project database. However, popup dialogs don't list baggage image files.

3. Instead, I save screen captures elsewhere. I often crop, resize and otherwise fiddle with images for graphic effect. I prefer not to work from the graphics application in the RH project folder, because I would have to keep careful track of which images already are linked. Resizing a linked image distorts the output because its original dimensions are in the html code. I would have to go back and re-link to the revised image.

4. When it's ready to be brought into the project, I import an image into a new topic, sometimes with a headline or caption, but usually with no text. If I have a lot of them, sometimes I add a folder to the project explorer for popups and use a file name like homescreen_pop.htm to remind me of which topic it belongs to.

Since it's an htm file, it appears in the popup hyperlink file list.

Yes, it's an extra step. I find it well worth the trouble.

Harvey

Here is a quick synopsis of what we were doing.

We were creating screen shot images as we went along using snagIt and saving them to our help project folder. Our process to link to images as "show me" files was that we would have an instance where we would like to popup a screen shot of the application (or portion of the app) that the user would be using at the time, so we would add the words "show me" in the topic text and then hyperlink those words using the Link to "File" option in the hyperlink dialog and link to the screen shot image we created. The user could then click the "show me" link and get a quick look at the screen shot image and then click away to close. This helped to keep the topic text cleaner, at least from our perspective.

Exactly how did you create popup boxes containing an image, rather than a topic containing an image, in RH X5?


Looking at the hyperlink dialog in RH 6,

When you select Link to > File . . . at top left, the radio button defaults to "Display in Frame." The navigation window lets you select anything. It shows everything in the project folder, including baggage files, and allows you to navigate outside the project. If you moved a file into the project folder in Windows explorer, RH doesn't know it's in the project, but it shows in the navigation window. You can select it and RH will add it to the project database, the same as if you found it in some other directory.

Once you select a file, the auto- and custom-sizing popup options are disabled. The image appears in the WebHelp topic frame.

When you start by selecting a popup option, the RH dialog doesn't show images, just the files in the project, and no navigation window. If you go back to Link to File . . . you lose the popup options.

I don't have X5 installed any more, but I'm guessing the popup options showed a navigation window, or at least a project file list that included images. Is that right?


Harvey

Rick, no we did not have to add the images to the baggage file in X5. The image files were included in our robohelp project and when we generated they were in the output file as well. Did not know this was a requirement.

So are you saying that each image needs to be added to the baggage file and this was true for X5 and X6?

Regards...

We found a workaround. If we changed the popup to display in a frame page default, they work fine. It is the auto sizing and customized popups that are not working and this is for image popups only (gif file). They were working fine in X5, so it has to be a bug in X6. Thank you!!

There's a current thread on popups in the General Discussion forum here.