Including H2s in the Table of Contents

[Gary Niemen]

For one of our products, we publish the release information in a .chm.
Each new release gets a topic. Each topic has about 30 H2s.
At the moment, the Table of Contents just lists the topics.
What I would like to do is list the topics and underneath each topic, its H2s.
Can anyone advise me? What would be the quickest/easiest way to set this up.

[wclass]

On the TOC entry properties page, there is an option to auto-generate parts of the TOC - you set how many levels you want. I have tried this out during testing and it works, but I have never used it for real, so I can't say how good the results are. Worth a try.

The slow way would be to create a TOC entry for each heading you want, and link to the right heading. I can't see anyway to drag and drop the headings, and it would have to be maintained manually.

[Gary Niemen]

Yippee - suggestion number 1 worked very well indeed.

Here's the TOC Properties window:

TOC_properties.png

[Gary Niemen]

I have just noticed that some of the automatically generated links do not work. In other words, all of my H2s become sub-headings in the TOC - but only some of the links actually work. Out of, say, 20, 15 work (you click them and they go to the H2) whereas the other 5 don't work (you click them and they don't go anywhere). Any clues where I might look to investigate this.

[Gary Niemen]

Solved it. Avoid using the colon (:) in headings.

[tscott]

So, 4 years later I've just run into this problem (and this post).

Topic names with colons in them result in bad links when sent to HTML5 output, in Flare V9.
The workaround is still to avoid colons in the names.

I'll submit this bug (?) to MadCap support.

[LTinker68]

I'll submit this bug (?) to MadCap support.

Colons are a reserved character in URLs; they're usually used to denote that a port number follows the colon. I'm kind of surprised Flare didn't remove that character altogether or give you a warning about it when you tried to create the topic. You also shouldn't use ampersands (&) because they're used to append parameters to URLs. Basically, you should avoid all special characters in file names except underscores. I'd even avoid spaces, although that is a valid character in a URL, but it can sometimes get translated to the character equivalent of a space, which can screw up links and such.