“How does Doc-To-Help break Word documents into Online Help topics?”

This is a question that I get pretty much every webcast.  For the most part, I direct people to the Breaks Word Documents into Topics for Online Targets in the Software Documentation sample project (My Documents > My Doc-To-Help Projects > Samples > SoftwareDocumentationWordSource folder).

But, I thought it would be a good idea to put the information online so that users could share the link and so that anyone that didn’t have Doc-To-Help installed would be able to understand how their document needs to be structured for Doc-To-Help to do all of the “heavy lifting” that it can do for you.

Books have chapters and sections; Help and web Targets have Topics. Doc-To-Help breaks your Word document into Topics and creates the project hierarchy from them. Any text that has a Heading style applied to it will be created as a topic and the text and images underneath that topic will be the topic text.

What Doc-To-Help does by default

By default, Heading 1′s automatically become parent topics, and all of the Heading 2′s under it become subtopics. Heading 3′s are the subtopics of Heading 2′s. This is a big time saver that not only eliminates reworking an existing project; it also makes it easy to logically create a new project. It also means that you should plan ahead when you’re writing your documents so that the table of contents will have the structure that you want on the first build in Doc-To-Help.  Word 2010 even has a hierarchy listed by Heading level in the Navigation pane, so that will give you a preview of what your TOC will look like as well.

“Pittsburgh Sports” is a Heading 1 followed by three Heading 2′s.

Doc-To-Help automatically broke it into four topics, and made the Heading 2′s subtopics of the Heading 1.

This is displayed in the Contents pane, as well as the Topics window.

• Heading 1s with no Heading 2s under them will appear at the main level
• Heading 1s with Heading 2s under them will appear at the main level as “books,” with the Heading 2s indented below them.
• If used, Heading 3s will be indented under Heading 2s; Heading 4s under Heading 3s.

In order for Doc-To-Help to recognize the structure of your documents, break them down into topics, and organize the topics into a table of contents, you need to hit the Rebuild button on the Home tab after you’ve imported your documents.  When you want to add new topics, you can make them show up in the Topics window and the Contents pane right away by adding them using the Add Topic button on the Doc-To-Help toolbar or Ribbon:

When you create new XHTML documents in Doc-To-Help for use in the built-in editor, it automatically applies the Heading style for you, adds the topic to the Topics window, and places the topic in the correct part of the hierarchy in the table of contents.

In the built-in editor, we recommend that you only have one topic for each document.  That makes it easier to manage topics and documents, increases build speed, and the New Document wizard helps you create the hierarchy on the fly by assigning a new topic as a sibling or a child of the selected document.

If you highlight a Heading 1 document in the Documents pane and create a new XHTML document, it will be a Heading 1 and will appear in the same level of the hierarchy in the TOC if you select the Sibling radio button:

If you highlight a Heading 1 document in the Documents pane, select the Child radio button, and create a new XHTML document– it will be a Heading 2 and will appear in the one level lower in the hierarchy in the TOC :

The same is true if you select a Heading 2 document.  The new document would be a Heading 2 if you selected the Sibling radio button and a Heading 3 if you selected the Child radio button.  And so on and so forth down the hierarchy.

See “How Doc-To-Help Makes Single-Sourcing Easier” for more information about single-sourcing in Doc-To-Help.