PDF Links Do Not Work

[KD6NRP]

Good Morning:

I am using Flare 12 to create a new online help project for an upcoming software release. The project has links from .htm topic to PDFs. Unfortunately, the PDFs do not open which I click on the various links.

Here is a summary of what I did:

1. I copied the project for the previous release, which was fully functional.
2. In the new project, I changed the product release variable on the variables page.
3. Each HTML topic file name contains the product release number and had to be updated.
a. I went into Flare
b. Right clicked on each file name
c. Renamed it
d. Hit return
e. In the dialog box that appeared, I selected Update all Links.
4. Opened each HTML topic within Flare and updated the links to the PDFs by searching for references to the old product release number and updating them (the PDF file names contain the software version number, so I had to update the HTML in the topics).
5. The product release number is also mentioned in two master pages. I opened those from within Flare and updated the product release.

After doing the above work, my HTML help topics look good, my PDFs look good, but the links from the HTML pages to the PDFs do not work.

Does anyone have any idea what the problem could be?

Regards,

Brian

[ChoccieMuffin]

This is the bit I'd check:

Opened each HTML topic within Flare and updated the links to the PDFs by searching for references to the old product release number and updating them (the PDF file names contain the software version number, so I had to update the HTML in the topics).

I suggest that rather than just editing the text in one of these topics, in the XML Editor edit the link itself so that it links to the newly named PDF and rebuild. I'm guessing the link in that topic will work. If it does, compare what's in the Text Editor in that topic with what's in the Text Editor in the topics that don't work. If you have a lot of topics that include the link you may be able to do a Search-and-Replace on your html files rather than having to manually edit all the topics, or just edit the link as described if there's only a few.

[jjw]

Can you see what's wrong with the links? I have a problem where I link to external Word documents in Word output, but Flare consistently creates a link with one too many levels (eg. "..\..\file.doc" instead of "..\file.doc"). I wonder if it's the same problem?