opening TOC

[tbraswell]

I was wondering if there is anyway I can open a topic from the TOC navigation frame, but have it show in the main content area instead?

[LTinker68]

Do you mean if you're looking at the TOC file in the XML Editor, is there a way to click on an entry there and have the topic open in the XML Editor? If that's what you mean, then yes. You can either right-click on the entry and select "Open link", or left-click on an entry to select it then click the "Open linked file" icon in the TOC Editor toolbar. Or you can hold the Ctrl key and double-click on the TOC entry.

[tbraswell]

No, that is not what I mean. Here I did a diagram.

madcapquestion.gif

[LTinker68]

That's the default behavior. I've never not seen them open in the main viewing area (the area to the right of the accordion buttons and below the toolbar). Where are your topics appearing? In the navigation pane above the accordion buttons?

[tbraswell]

No the topics are appearing as indicated in the diagram. However since my audience consists of users who have never used a computer before they had issues, so it was suggested to me that I have the TOC open in the main content area instead of in the toc frame.

[KevinDAmery]

So you want the TOC tree in your output to appear in the main view instead of along the left side? I'm not aware of a way to do that--I suppose you could manually build a topic with a list of links, but it'd be a pain to maintain if your structure changed.

[gkidder]

I get it -- you just want to replicate your TOC as a first content page, right? I would suggest you just create a new topic page that has a list of links to your main topics. Sort of a mini-TOC.

[LTinker68]

Like Kevin said, though, you'd have to maintain the links on the page manually (they wouldn't update automatically if you changed the main TOC structure). Plus you can't really replicate the book and topic icons unless you make special bullets.

Make sure you submit a feature request at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx to add the ability to use the TOC proxy for online output. Right now it's only available for print output. I believe someone else has mentioned the same request somewhat recently, but the more people who request a feature, the more likely that MadCap will add the feature and add it sooner.

[tbraswell]

Yes. I would like to replicate my TOC as a first content page, sorry for the confusion when I didn't state it correctly. I thought maybe I could change the javascript within the MadCapNavigation.js file but that didn't work either or I'm not that proficient with changing a function.

I will definetly submit the feature request today, thank you all for your help!