A customer just e-mailed me with a question on hyperlinks (topic links) in her printed manual and it’s a very good question. It’s also a great example of the single-sourcing features built into Doc-To-Help, so I thought I would write a blog post about it.
Here is the question:
“In my printed manual,I don’t want links to appear in underlined blue (although that’s fine in the on-line help). How can I make links in the printed manual look like plain text?”
This is something that you can automate in Doc-To-Help by clearing a checkbox.
If you’re just looking to turn the links into plain text, go to the Home tab and click the Help Targets dialog box launcher:
Select your Manual target and clear the Live Links checkbox.
Hit OK. Go to the Home tab and click Rebuild. That’s it.
To take advantage of an additional single-sourcing feature in Doc-To-Help, go to the Project tab and click the Project Styles button.
Select the C1H Jump style (under Character Styles) and check the Include page number in reference checkbox and put the text “on page ” (without quotes) in the Replacement field.
Tip: You don’t need to put the words “on page ” in the Replacement field. That can be anything you want it to be, but “on page ” is the most popular way to indicate a cross-reference. It’s important to put a space in “on page ” since Doc-To-Help will automatically insert the page number at the end of the reference. If there’s no space, the page number will be inserted immediately after the Replacement text (i.e. on page47).
When you Rebuild, every topic link in the source files — whether they were written in Word, HTML, or the XHTML editor — will be in plain text and have a page number reference listed next to them (with a space between the page number and the “on page” text.) Build either the SoftwareDocumentationXMLSource sample or the SoftwareDocumentationWordSource sample that installs with Doc-To-Help for an example of this functionality. You can also take a look at the source documents in those projects to see how the links are applied and the text for the links is written. The links are named after the topics they’re linking to and the word “see” appears before the topic link text so that the text appears as “See on page XX”.
These are important single-sourcing features, because you don’t have to do anything to the Manual after you build it to guarantee that it has page references (or just plain text). You don’t have to do anything to the Help to make sure that the links are in there. You don’t have to do anything to the source documents to make sure this happens, either. Doc-To-Help just does it for you behind the scenes depending on what you’re building.
If you have a Word document that has cross-references to Heading styles in the document, Doc-To-Help will automatically turn those references into topic links when you build the Help and automatically retain them when you build the Manual.
(+2 rating, 2 votes)
Hi Brad,
Do I understand this correctly – When I use the Link button and set my project up for links to become cross-references, I cannot use the “Complete cross-reference” feature?
Regards, Gabi.
That is correct. You would need to use one or the other.
We recommend the Link button option.
Gabi,
You don’t need to use quotes if you create the links with Doc-To-Help. If you highlight the text, create the link using the Link button on the Doc-To-Help toolbar, then click the italics button in the editor, the text will be in italics when you build the manual. The quotes were used an example, but you can format it however you’d like.
The important thing to note here is that you’re using the Link button in Doc-To-Help, not the cross-reference feature in Word. Setting your project up this way with links that become cross-references (instead of the other way around) is the recommended way to do it.
Hope this helps!
Brad
Hi Brad,
is there a way to modify how the quoted heading looks like once “Complete Cross Reference” has been chosen? In our case, I do not want the quotes (“) before and after the heading; instead, I’d like to have the heading text in italics.
Many thanks, Gabi.