#$KOne of the most critical parts of designing a large application is making it easy for the user to locate the desired information. You do this in part by placing information into a logical hierarchy of topics and groups, and giving the user a clear path through hot spots. Sometimes this isn’t enough. The user may not know enough to tell which topic or group will contain the needed information, or it may be spread over a number of different topics. This is when the user must depend on Viewer’s Index and Search functions.

KThe Index function corresponds closely to the index in a book. You look up a word in the list provided and get a list of associated topics. You then select one of those topics, and Viewer displays it. All of this becomes available if you define keywords in your topics, as demonstrated in Chapter 3. Keywords can be defined anywhere within a topic, not only at the beginning. The topic will be displayed starting at the beginning of the paragraph where the selected keyword was defined. You can also use more than one keyword list. This can be useful to divide an overly–long list into logical categories that make it easier for the user. This technique is demonstrated in How–To 11.1

# $KK One of the greatest strengths of Viewer is its powerful Searching capability, and especially the degree that the author can easily control this capability. In its simplest form, this lets the user search the entire text of your application for desired words. It’s as though you defined every word as an index keyword, except that the basic Search function doesn’t show the user a list of words to choose from.

KKThe user can search for words or phrases anywhere in the text, or limit the search to topic groups or text categories that were defined by the author. The search criteria can combine terms with logical operators (such as and, or, and not) to refine help narrow the search. The Search dialog box is created dynamically by Viewer, to include the capabilities that were defined by the author. A Search dialog box showing all of the standard options is shown in Figure 11–1.