Online Help Search Results and PDFs

[dfuller95]

I've posed the following question before and nobody replied, so either A) it's a unique issue that nobody can speak to, B) it's an exceedingly stupid question that no one has the patience to entertain, or C) the question was so poorly worded as to be incomprehensible.

Since "A" seems unlikely, and I don't want to believe "B" (people are generally too kind to leave us dummies in the lurch), I'll restate the question and hope for the best.

When doing a search in our online help system (HTML5 target), the results will appropriately return the topics and PDF/Word documents in which the search term is used.

However, the descriptions for the PDF and Word docs listed in the search results page are longer than those of the regular topics (defying the Abstract Character Limit defined in the Flare settings), and the descriptions themselves are basically just a string of text consisting of the PDF title, copyright blurb, and a portion of the TOC.

For PDFs and Word docs, how do you control/change the character limit of the search results summaries, and the actual wording of the summaries that display?

Best regards,

David

[doc_guy]

I think A is most likely your answer in this case. I think providing Word and PDF items is not a common (not unique, just uncommon) use case, so people haven't seen it yet.

I would submit this as a bug report to MadCap. The defined Flare setting should apply to all content types.

My guess is that MadCap doesn't have a test case for this particular scenario.

[dfuller95]

Thanks, doc_guy. I'll report this as a bug.

[Psider]

I wonder if the document properties on the Word or PDF document would have an effect? So for example, in Word click the Developer tab, then Document Panel and play with Subject and Comments. Or for PDF documents (with Pro DC) File > Properties > Additional Metadata and play with Description.

Just thinking out loud as I've never looked at include pdf or word docs in search results.

[dfuller95]

Good suggestion, Psider. I'll give that a try. Thanks for responding.