hyperlinks in Word output

[mitches]

I put hyperlinks in my help files and expected them to carry through to the generated Word .doc. Instead of linking within the document, they link to external files. Is there some way to overcome this?

[KevinDAmery]

For print linking, you may want to use cross references instead of hyperlinks. Cross references behave like hyperlinks in online output, but like Word cross refs in the print output. You can also set them up so that they appear differently in each type of output (e.g. for print it could be formatted as "see [cross reference topic] in page [cross reference page number]" whereas for online it could be "see Cross Reference Topic.")

[mitches]

Will the cross-reference allow the viewer of the .doc to jump to the location?

[kristil]

Crossreferences will create a Word cross-reference that users can use to jump to the location. You'll have to play with the formatting of the crossref to make sure there is some visual clue for users that they can click it and jump to the location.

Aside from switching to crossrefs, the links in your .doc ought to work. Do all your links do this? If it is only some of your links, could it be that the topic you linked to didn't get included in the Word output? Also, sometimes when I have this problem if I go back into Flare and edit the hyperlink, then re-select the topic I'm linking to, it fixes the problem. I can only assume that I applied it incorrectly the first time, or else the link didn't update properly. I wonder if someone can provide a more technical explanation. . .

[Ken Billing]

My experience so far with Flare cross-references is contrary to the last post that says "Cross-references will create a Word cross-reference that users can use to jump to the location." This is a huge problem since many of the legacy documents that I'm importing into Flare contain Word cross-references, not text hyperlinks. The Word cross-references become Flare cross-references that, when output to HTML Help, become hyperlinks as desired. But, if they are output to a Word target, they become regular text without a link. Besides preventing the user from being able to jump to the referenced topic, it prevents round-tripping the Word output back into Flare. The Flare documentation only discusses using cross-references with print documentation to output page numbers, not to output cross-references.

The problem with using hyperlinks is that they are static and can't be updated like a cross-reference can if the target text changes.

Am I missing something?
How can I maintain a cross-reference from Word->Flare->Word?

[kristil]

My first experience with cross-references from Word->Flare-> was not successful because the imported cross references didn't work in Flare. I wonder if this was because I broke my word documents into smaller docs before importing. Others on my team didn't have as many issues. I am hoping my next import goes more smoothly.

Xrefs in Flare, in my experience, will create cross-references in Word output, which you can click to jump to the referenced page or paragraph. What xrefs will not create is hyperlinks. This was an unpleasant surprise for us because our previous Word format was to have the hyperlink followed by the crossreferenced page number. That way we could accomodate both soft copy and hard copy users of the manual. Since Flare doesn't do that and we want to use all xrefs, we'll have to do a little rewriting and some experimenting with formatting of xrefs.