Conditional text appearing in Search

[michaelb27535086]

I have a RH 11 project that uses conditional tags to generate customized content for each of our products. Some of the tags are applied at the topic level in the TOC, while others are applied to selected text within topics. When I generate the CHM, conditionalized topics whose tags were excluded don't appear in the TOC. However, if I go to the Search tab and enter a word or phrase that appears only in excluded topics, those topics suddenly show up in the search results!

Why does the Search function find excluded topics? Why were they generated at all, if those tags were excluded? At first I thought it was due to the fact that the tag was applied at the topic level. But when I went back and applied conditional tags to the text within these topics as well, I got the same results.

Thanks!

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

Note that a link from a TOC entry is no different from a link from another topic. It's just an access point to the topic. So if a tag is applied to the TOC entry it will disappear from the TOC but will still be part of the project and is a candidate to be found using Search.

When you look at the SSL recipe settings for Microsoft HTML Help, you should hopefully see an option labeled "Exclude Unreferenced Topics from Output". (I'm using RoboHelp (2015 Release) at the moment and don't have access to RoboHelp 11, but I believe that option exists in 11. Have you tried ensuring that option is enabled?

If the option isn't enabled, enabling it and compiling a new CHM should do the trick. And if it doesn't, it could also mean that a topic somewhere inside the CHM is actually linking to that topic.

Cheers... Rick

[Captiv8r]

Oh, and this bit seems to escape many RoboHelp authors. If you tag a topic at the topic level, there is no need to tag it in the TOC. This is because if the build expression actually causes the topic to be excluded, then nothing is there for the TOC to link to. As a result, there is no TOC entry for the topic and you should not find the topic content in the search.

[michaelb27535086]

Hi Rick - ok, I wasn't aware of that option in the Generate Layout window. I'll try using it.