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Subject:Re: Help System See-Also loops From:"Wing, Michael J" <mjwing -at- INGR -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 5 Nov 1996 12:42:52 -0600
Why not use A-Links? This is where their strength lies. They
automatically create a pop-up of a dynamically-built list of topics (the
current topic is automatically omitted from the list). All you need to
do is include a key word (no need to generate pop-up topics) and a
calling macro. If a topic is deleted, it is automatically eliminated
from the list.
(If you are using Winhelp 3.1 I think you can get creative with the
KLink macro and include K endnote terms in which to associate -- the
drawback is that the terms appear in the index).
Mike
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
_/
_/ Michael Wing
_/ Principal Technical Writer
_/ Infrastructure Technical Information Development
_/ Intergraph Corporation
_/ Huntsville, Alabama
_/ (205) 730-7250
_/ mjwing -at- ingr -dot- com
_/
>I'm fixing up a help system. Most of the topics have a see-also popup.
>Now, in a lot of cases, the topics belong to logical groups. For example,
>there are topics that describe each of the database commands, of which
>there are maybe ten. Each of those topics has a unique see-also popup
>that refers to all the other topics in the group. This means that there
>are ten almost identical popups. The only difference between those popups
>is that the popup for, for example "open_database" doesn't have a
>reference to "open_database."
>I could save a significant amount of effort if I just used the same
>see-also popup for all the topics in a group. The see-also lists would be
>less likely to miss a topic, since they would be complete lists of topic
>groups. The only downside is that there would be these loops: you click
>on see-also, and one of the options is the topic you are looking at. How
>much pain do you think such a loop causes?
