If links aren't found on publish, what happens?

[cayennep]

Hi all

In a previous tool, I could create links to books or topics that may or not be published with a certain book. On publish, if the linked topic wasn't found, it removed the link and just used the text.

Can anybody tell me how this works in Flare? Yes, I will test it but thought I'd ask first in case I can remove it from the long list of things I have yet to learn/discover here!

thanks so much
Cayenne

[GregStenhouse]

I think it varies depending on target. For me, HTML help strips the link info but leaves the text, for word output the link and text is removed.

What have you found?

Cheers
Greg

[cayennep]

hmm, again counterintuitive - it appears if I link to a topic but don't include it in the TOC, it's still included in the output. Doesn't show up in the TOC but opens if I click a hyperlink to it.

Not my favorite, wonder why it's done this way - and, even more important, how you got the results you did. That seems ideal, to leave the text but strip the link, but do you know what you did to cause this behavior?

thx
Cayenne

[LTinker68]

hmm, again counterintuitive - it appears if I link to a topic but don't include it in the TOC, it's still included in the output. Doesn't show up in the TOC but opens if I click a hyperlink to it.

It's done this way because online output can be more interactive than print output. For instance, I have a process flow diagram (image) in a topic and I use an image map with hotspots on the various steps of the process. When the user clicks on a process step, a small popup window appears describing what's involved in that process step. I don't want those popup topics to be in the TOC because they're only supposed to be called up from the image map. If those topics were in the TOC, then the user would be confused if they looked at them without the image map, because the popup topic's content isn't in context -- it needs the image map for the content to make sense.

Another example may be a series of topics that are step-by-step instructions on how to do something. If you want to make sure the user always starts at that first step, then you could include only that step in the TOC. The user could still search for the other steps, unless you disable that function on the secondary topics, but if they're going through the TOC, then they'd have to start at that first topic. (You could also use a browse sequence to make the step-by-step nature more obvious.)

[cayennep]

aha! thanks

Glad to know there is rhyme and reason to this one, then I can figure out how I want to approach it. Not the case with all the stuff I've run across, tho

Thanks for this, much appreciated, and that does make sense.