Index and Glossary in Top Navigation template

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drcsontos
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Index and Glossary in Top Navigation template

Post by drcsontos »

Dear All,

I created our manual by using the tripane template. Now, I have been asked to 'convert' it to 'topnav'. I followed the instructions of the following link:

http://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare201 ... ionAdv.htm

I think it is a very good article. I could also position the side menu, but I could not 'pin' it to the top (since in that case I should have used a two column structure of the page)
On the other hand I had to realize that my glossary and index gone.
Can you confirm that in the topnav skin I cannot use index and glossary?

Also, can you provide other links regarding tripane-> topnav conversion or about the topnav skin, please?
I could not find training videos about the topnav skin, either.
Thank you for your help and coopertaion in advance.
Regards,
Attila
bunnycat
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Re: Index and Glossary in Top Navigation template

Post by bunnycat »

I remember from two MadCap webinars that Indexes and Glossaries ala tripane output are not supported by the TopNav HTML5 output.
[*]Goodbye Tripane, Hello Frameless Top Navigation Web Output – Parts 1 & 2 webinars

I suppose with the robust search feature, and the ability to have search filtering etc in TopNav, the traditional Indexes and Glossaries tabs just aren't really needed as features.

In my own projects that have TopNav output, I still have some indexed items tagged within topics, but I only use them for PDF output, where an index is still supported (and needed).

Elsewhere in the forums, I believe it was suggested that if you really needed a glossary as part of a TopNav output, that you could work around it with a glossary/terminology topic, and not use the Glossary (.flglo) in the Project. Not perfect, but it's something.
NorthEast
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Re: Index and Glossary in Top Navigation template

Post by NorthEast »

It's only the glossary pane that's missing in Top Nav, you can still have have marked glossary terms with popup definitions (or are linked to another topic).
garlindj59
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Re: Index and Glossary in Top Navigation template

Post by garlindj59 »

If I am creating a new project in Flare, what template would I use to create Top Level navigation? Specifically, we want hyperlinked alphabet letters to appear (A-Z) at the top of glossary. Thank you!
kmorrison
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Re: Index and Glossary in Top Navigation template

Post by kmorrison »

The Elasticsearch option in Flare 2018 looks cool, but it looks like we have to give up the glossary tab we have in the tripane help if we want to use it. I suspect some users will miss having the glossary on a handy little tab. (If they'd never had it, they wouldn't think to ask for it, but I've discovered that if I take a feature away, people will ask where it went.) Has anyone seen/invented any hacks for getting a glossary tab (or the equivalent) into a side navigation type skin so that it looks slick?

(I am aware of the option to create links to glossary terms, but I don't love that option. Because reasons.)
kmorrison
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Re: Index and Glossary in Top Navigation template

Post by kmorrison »

garlindj59 wrote:If I am creating a new project in Flare, what template would I use to create Top Level navigation? Specifically, we want hyperlinked alphabet letters to appear (A-Z) at the top of glossary. Thank you!
We had a similar problem, where we needed a secondary index and we wanted there to be links to the letters across the top. We ended up just creating a topic with headings for the letters, each followed by a list of links in alphabetical order. Then we put a menu proxy at the top of the page to link to the various headings within the topic.
moshe
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Re: Index and Glossary in Top Navigation template

Post by moshe »

kmorrison wrote:Has anyone seen/invented any hacks for getting a glossary tab (or the equivalent) into a side navigation type skin so that it looks slick?
We did not move from Tripane to TopNav because our users liked having the navigation hierarchy visible when viewing a topic. (In TopNav, when you open a topic, the top navigation menu closes.) Now I'm experimenting with the new SideNav skin, in which the side navigation pane remains visible when viewing a topic. I implemented the glossary as follows:

Prerequisite: a Flare Glossary file (glossary.flglo). My glossary file was the same file that I used in Tripane, which I had created by importing from MSWord. (That import process was the subject of a presentation that I made at a local Flare User Group meeting.)

1. Create a new empty topic for the glossary.
2. Add to the topic a single <h1> title tag (i.e., "Glossary").
3. Below the title, insert a glossary proxy.
4. Add the topic to your TOC.

The topic looks like this:
GlossaryPage.png
When the project is built, it produces a single page topic in which all of the glossary entries are presented in a single alphabetized list.
Note that since the output produces the glossary as a standard html page, I am able to style it. For instance, here I styled the glossary terms and removed the default bullets leading the terms.
Does this look "slick" enough? 8)
GlossaryTopic.png
There remain a few challenges:
  • * I haven't yet been able to figure out a way to link between glossary entries. (for instance, "See TermX", with a link to TermX). If I manually insert a hyperlink to an anchor within the XML of the glossary.flglo file, the link is stripped out during the build processing. If, instead of using the glossary proxy, I simply have a list of terms in a standard topic, I could easily link between them, but then I don't think that the glossary entry would show up as the first result of a search for that term.
  • * It would be nice to have an easy way to insert <h2> headers to separate each starting letter of the alphabetized list.
I hope that this helps.
Moshe
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Moshe Davis
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aneedell
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Re: Index and Glossary in Top Navigation template

Post by aneedell »

Hello, Moshe. Indeed, it does look slick! But I have a question for you. Given that the contents of the page are generated, how do you apply your custom styles to the content?
Fiona
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Re: Index and Glossary in Top Navigation template

Post by Fiona »

I realise that this is an old post but I'm trying to do something similar myself (moving from TriPane to SideNav) and the questions that @Moshe asks don't seem to have been answered...I'm hoping that someone will be able to make some suggestions now that things are a couple of years further down the line!

The challengs that Moshe identified (and that I'm now seeking solutions to) are:
  • I haven't yet been able to figure out a way to link between glossary entries. (for instance, "See TermX", with a link to TermX). If I manually insert a hyperlink to an anchor within the XML of the glossary.flglo file, the link is stripped out during the build processing. If, instead of using the glossary proxy, I simply have a list of terms in a standard topic, I could easily link between them, but then I don't think that the glossary entry would show up as the first result of a search for that term.
  • It would be nice to have an easy way to insert <h2> headers to separate each starting letter of the alphabetized list.
To these I would like to add:
  • It would be nice to have the alphabet across the top of the page, with each letter clickable and linking to the <h2> headers mentioned in Moshe's second issue
I realise that I could do these things by setting up the gloassary as a standard topic, but that introduces the risk of the two sources becoming out of sync. Is anyone able to offer any solutions to any of these issues?

Thanks. Fiona
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