is there a way to auto-generate bookmarks in headings?

[kristil]

I've been poring through the CSS properties trying to guess which one might do this . . .

[LTinker68]

That's because it's not a CSS property. Bookmarks in HTML (and through Flare) are <a> tags. The format would be something like:

Code: Select all

<h1><a name="configScreen"></a>Configuration Screen</h1>

(Where the <a> tag falls on that line depends on where your cursor was when you inserted the bookmark. And note there's nothing between the opening <a> and closing </a> tags -- this isn't an href tag that you may be more familiar with, although you can combine a bookmark (name) with a hyperlink (href) in the same <a> tag.)

If you're using templates with Flare, then you could insert a bookmark in your template topic and give it a generic name, like "TopicTitle". That bookmark would then exist in every topic you create from the template. And you can have the same bookmark name in multiple topics -- you just can't have it exist multiple times in the same topic. But once the topic is created, you could always rename the bookmark.

That's about the only way I can think of to have the bookmark added automatically when you create a topic. You could certainly submit a feature request asking for the functionality. It should be fairly simple to add a field to the Add New Topic screen where you can enter the bookmark name at the same time you give the topic its title. Or add a checkbox that when checked creates a bookmark automatically based on the title you enter. (For example, "The Configuration Screen" would have a bookmark called "TheConfigurationScreen".) Submit the feature request at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx.

[kristil]

That is a very good idea, putting one in a template topic. As of right now, we don't use template topics, but we may in the future. At least I can stop looking for a CSS property. I misunderstood a post I had come across here on the forum, which made me think I would find such a property.

I did submit that feature request, by the way.

[KevinDAmery]

Looking at things from a slightly different angle, what do you need the bookmarks for? If it's to be able to manually link / cross reference a specific place in the topic, you can direct a link to a heading in a topic when creating the link. When you do this, Flare will automatically create a bookmark to that specific heading.

This won't be of much use if you're looking to create bookmarks for every heading for use in a PDF, of course, but it can be of use under certain circumstances.

[kristil]

I was curious because we have some trouble with hyperlinks coming out unformatted in Word targets. They're linked, but they aren't blue and underlined. So we've been reapplying those hyperlinks in Word. And without having given it too much detailed thought, I assumed we would still want to use our bookmark naming convention that we used in Word for all our bookmarks in Flare. As far as hyperlinks to headings creating bookmarks, that is good to know. I wonder if those are the TOCnumbered bookmarks that I just spent time deleting from my project. I assumed those were some sort of imported Word doc clutter.
I wonder if it wouldn't somehow be better practise to name the bookmarks according to a standard. Wouldn't make them easier to find when linking to them more than once?
It would be useful to have auto bookmarks for our CS help. We use certain styles for field descriptions, then bookmark those descriptions for CS help.

This won't be of much use if you're looking to create bookmarks for every heading for use in a PDF, of course, but it can be of use under certain circumstances.

Do you mean when creating PDFs straight from Flare?

[KevinDAmery]

Ok, there are a couple of separate things here:

1) The statement I made about bookmarks in PDF was more along the lines of automatically having a bookmark that jumps to each heading in the PDF. Personally I think that might be overkill, but I can see some people wanting it (and who am I to say they're wrong?) At the moment, though, there isn't an automated way to do that other than assigning the heading level as part of your TOC.

2) In a completely separate issue, apparently there are problems getting Word to recognize hyperlinks from Flare as links. That probably explains the problems you're having. My understanding is that for those who are running the Blaze beta, when they create a PDF directly from Blaze the hyperlinks work correctly--it's only when you run through Word or Frame first that a problem occurs. (And presumably whenever Flare 4 is released it too would have similar direct to PDF capabilities as Blaze has.)

Hopefully that makes things clearer. (It's my first day back from vacation so the thought processes are still a little murky....)

[kristil]

I'm definitely doing some fuzzy exploring of bookmarks. I'm not sure exactly what we need.

We create Word 2003 targets and then use Acrobat to create PDFs. I've done this once, so far, but I applied our Word template. I just tested PDFing the Word target without attaching our template, and there are no bookmarks. I didn't even know that was an issue. We would like to have very minimal post-processing, and we'd like to eliminate the step of attaching the Word template and applying those template styles. How do we get our headings to become bookmarks in PDFs?

[KevinDAmery]

Sorry, there I can't help you (I don't create PDFs here, only CHM and .DOC for in-house printing).

[kristil]

This turned out not to be a problem. We use Acrobat Professional, and it seems that by default it wanted to use Word headings for bookmarks, rather than "h1, h2" -- Flare's CSS heading styles. So all I had to do was go into the Adobe PDF menu and select Change Conversion Settings. Then I selected the CSS headings as the styles that create bookmarks. Easy-peasy.