Toggler, expanding, drop-down text: What's the difference?

[mafaulkner]

I'm new to Flare and poring over the Help, trying to understand the distinction between togglers ("a feature that lets you 'toggle' between hiding and showing a tagged chunk of content"), expanding text ("a feature that lets you 'scrunch up' content in a paragraph in your topic"), and drop-down text ("a feature that lets you 'scrunch up' content in your topic").

What's the difference between hiding and "scrunching up"? Is the difference between expanding text and drop-down text only the amount of text involved (content in a topic vs. content in a paragraph)?

Does anyone have guidelines or advice about when to use each feature?

Thanks.

[i-tietz]

It's always
a. some sort of link and
b. the hidden/revealed elements.

A dropdown needs at least 2 paragraphs/block elements to work. The link is the first element, then the content follows immediately. The content contains at least one element, but can contain pages and pages full of text, images, tables, etc.

An expanding text is a link and the revealed/hidden text follows that link immediately. That is the same as in dropdowns, but: Both parts gotta be inside the same element. - I remember that it wasn't possible to have a whole paragraph or even more than one paragraph in link or content.

A toggler is different from those two above: Link and content can be anywhere in the topic and the content can be more than just one block - it could be many and they don't even have to follow each other. The link reveals/hides all elements that have the same name - whereever they are.
Typical use cases:
- Toggler link "Images" reveals all the images andd illustrations in the topic that weren't visible on loading the topic.
- More than one product model in the same topic. You can switch the whole topic to the content for the wanted model.

[mafaulkner]

Thank you. I'll have to work through those as examples to make sure I understand them!

Does anyone else have advice or guidelines about how you use these in your documentation?

[LTinker68]

I don't use expanding text or drop-down text at all. For awhile I did use the expanding text option with glossary terms, but between glossary terms, xrefs, hyperlinks, etc., it got to be too many links on a page, especially since I styled each type of hyperlink differently to try to give visual cues about the types of links they were. Decided that was too busy and most people wouldn't figure out the differences in link colors or bother to look at the "Using this Online Help" topic, so now I just have togglers and xrefs in my topics, and they appear differently because of the expand icon (arrow) on the togglers.

For the togglers, I use them in numbered instructions to show/hide screenshots and captions. When the topic is first opened, the user just sees the instructions, and has a choice of showing the screenshot for one step or showing all screenshots or not showing any screenshots.

I also use the togglers on some "task" topics and FAQ topics. When the topic is first opened, the user sees just a list of tasks or FAQs and can expand the specific one they want to read. Some of those items can be done with drop-down text instead of togglers, but I stick to just one effect to make it easier for me as the author, since the process is the same from topic to topic, regardless of how much content I want to be in the toggler.

[sQuimby]

Another question on the subject: I'm trying to to use a toggler to allow users to select instructions unique to their product (one of two options), but I cannot find out how to incorporate any boolean logic into togglers (i.e. if A is selected, unselect B, and vice versa). Any advice or solution to this?

[LTinker68]

The only way to do it natively in Flare is to use conditions and generate an output for each condition, so in your example, you'd have two outputs and you'd deliver the correct output with the corresponding product.

You could perhaps incorporate some JavaScript or other logic that shows/hides the toggler and content based on a "flag" or something you set. That's a lot more complex to set up and probably requires more interaction with the topic code.

Make sure you submit a feature request at https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback ... quest.aspx.