Accessing and linking topics

There are numerous ways users open topics and find information in your Help system.

Create a table of contents

The TOC serves as an entrance to your Help project and is a critical navigation tool for your end users. The TOC Composer allows you to effortlessly create a table of contents. You visually design and configure it and you can customize it to suit your needs. All you need to do is open your project, click the TOC tab, add books and pages, and rearrange their order. Then you can select combinations of options that define how your TOC looks and behaves when it's displayed in the Contents tab. You can even select the kind of icons to display — standard books and pages, folders, globes, and more.

Want to build a table of contents quickly? Use Auto Create TOC. Within minutes, a thorough and well-organized table of contents is automatically designed for you.

Design an index

Indexes are important because they provide a way for users to find information according to their ways of thinking. You can index efficiently and create detailed, multi-level indexes for your Help projects. You build your keyword list right in the Index Designer and drag and drop topics into it. It shows you the results as you create it, so testing and editing is a snap.

Short on time? Let the Smart Index Wizard generate your index for you. The Smart Index Wizard is an automated solution for producing online indexes. It greatly simplifies index preparation — whether you need to enhance an existing index or create an entirely new one. It automates tasks that you would normally do by hand, streamlining the process and saving you countless hours of time.

Include full-text search

You can add a full-text Search tab to the navigation pane that displays the Contents and Index tab in the viewer. (These features are enabled by default.) When you generate output, full-text search functionality is added as a feature in your Help system. Users enter words or phrases they want to find in topics. Full-text search scans topic content and displays a list of all topics that match the user's search criteria.

Link information

Present your end users with ways to freely navigate through the information in your Help systems by adding links. Add basic text links, and get to more specific places in topics by adding bookmarks. Image maps (multi-clickable images) let you link different parts of a graphic to multiple topics.

You can take users to countless destinations including local and external topics, Web sites, intranet pages, pre-addressed email messages, FTP sites, newsgroups and even to topics in WinHelp Help systems. Links can open in the Help viewer, custom windows you design, or in popup windows.

Build in link controls and guide your end users to interrelated topics. Link controls are navigation features that provide users with a list of alternate or related topics to go to. These controls are usually in the form of clickable buttons that display topic titles users select to open. You can create three different kinds of link controls: ALinks (Related Topics), related topics, and keyword links.

Let users browse

Browse sequences provide a way for users to move forward and backward through a series of topics arranged in a specific order. You define the order based on what you want users to accomplish or know after browsing through the topics and reading the content. From the Help viewer, users click navigation buttons to work with browse sequences. They are especially useful for tutorials because you can specify the order in which users view topics and understand concepts.