Renaming .htm files

[dwag]

My project contains a load of topics that require ridiculously long titles, but I need the corresponding .htm titles to be half the size. What's the best way to shorten the .htm titles, simply by renaming?

[LTinker68]

I'm a little confused. Are you saying the filenames and topic titles/first headings are both really long, and you want to shorten the filenames? Or are you asking about shortening the text in the TOC?

[dwag]

The former. Sorry for the confusion. As I try to rename the files, about 2/3 of the time I get an error message that the name is too long (even if I chop it down to a few words) and something about a catapult. (How's that for being technical?) So even though I'm able to rename successfully about 1/3 of the time, I figure my approach is too obvious.

Update: Just discovered I can rename from Windows Explorer without error. (Had been trying to rename them from within Flare.) Probably should've waited longer before posting. Thanks.

[LTinker68]

Update: Just discovered I can rename from Windows Explorer without error. (Had been trying to rename them from within Flare.) Probably should've waited longer before posting. Thanks.

Don't do that! Don't rename from within Windows Explorer. If you do, all the links to those topics within the project will be broken. Rename them within Flare, because it will then ask if you want to update links, at which point you say yes. If you haven't yet created links to the topics, then you can rename them in Windows Explorer, but generally you want to do it within Flare.

As for why you might have still been getting the too long error message... Windows is limited to 255 or 256 characters (I can never remember which), which includes the full path to the file. For example, C:\Documents and Settings\your.name\My Documents\My Projects\ProjectName\Content\FolderName1\FolderName1A\TopicFilenameHere.htm. Your topic filename might be TopicFilenameHere.htm and therefore only 21 characters long, but when you add in the full path to that file, it's 127 characters long. If you have folders inside folders inside folders, etc., then you can hit that Windows limit. It's generally recommended that you keep your projects at the root level of the computer, e.g., C:\HelpProjects\ProjectName. That gets rid of the whole "documents and settings", your name, etc., which will shorten the path quite a bit.

[dwag]

All of the topics except one were without links, so I avoided that headache. Thanks for taking the time to explain the possible reason for the error messages. Sounds correct to me. I wanted to stay in Flare, but 7 out of 10 tries, I got the error. From Explorer, I was able to rip through the folders changing names. Then all I had to do was return to Flare and check all of the "new" files into source control. When I built the latest, of course, the one file with the link appeared in the error report. Thanks, again.