Concept Links & HTML Help (yet again...)

[MC Hammer]

Me again, with my favourite subject
I have two issues with Concept Links (or A-links):
1/ My colleague cannot get the concept links to work properly on our projects (same PC spec as me, same OS - XP Pro SP2, same regional language settings, same CHM build. Main difference is that her default browser is FF, mine is IE7). She gets a "This operation can only function within HTML Help" message when clicking on a concept link. I made FF the default browser on my PC and when I click on the concept links, they work fine. Does this have to do with some Microsoft Security Updates?

2/ We have a project in Flare that has two targets with conditions. The language for the whole project is set to English (same as for our other projects). Target A displays a Topics Found dialog when a concept link is clicked whereas target B displays the "normal" popup with the list of topics related. Target A and B are very close and mainly differ by the app name and by some topics that are exclusive to one or the other. Concept links are the same for both targets.

Any ideas?
Many thanks,

[Pete Lees]

Hi again, Marie-Claire,

She gets a "This operation can only function within HTML Help" message when clicking on a concept link.

One possible explanation for this is that the HTML Help ActiveX control on her machine is incorrectly registered. So, it would be a good idea to run MJ's Help Diagnostics and have it check for and refresh the registration of all the HTML Help DLLs.

http://helpware.net/downloads/index.htm#MJs

Alternatively, your colleague can reregister the ActiveX control by typing the following two commands in a Command Prompt window:

Code: Select all

regsvr32 /u %windir%\system32\hhctrl.ocx
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\hhctrl.ocx

It doesn't matter that your colleague's default browser is FireFox, as HTML Help always uses Internet Explorer to render the HTML content. (The topic pane of the help viewer is actually an embedded Internet Explorer window.)

We have a project in Flare that has two targets with conditions. The language for the whole project is set to English (same as for our other projects). Target A displays a Topics Found dialog when a concept link is clicked whereas target B displays the "normal" popup with the list of topics related.

It would be good to look at the project options for these two help files. Can you locate the appropriate HTML Help project (.hhp) files, open them in a text editor like Notepad, and then copy and paste the contents of the [OPTIONS] sections into a reply?

One thing that may be relevant is that when the number of target topics exceeds (I think) 19, they are always displayed in a Topics Found dialog box — even if you've configured the link to display them on a popup menu.

Pete

[MC Hammer]

Hi Pete
Thank you for your help.
Please find below the requested information (I have anonamised the data).
The referred topics in the Concept links never exceed 10 and what puzzles me is that the Flare project is common, most topics are common (with conditions, obviously) and the concept links are common so I would expect behaviour to be the same.
Product W's Help is the only one displaying a popup window. Both products C and F's Help displays a Topics Found dialog...

HHP_Options.gif

These tutorials are slave projects (CHMs) and are accessed via a master project (CHM as well) which is also common and has conditions. This master project is currently built on RoboHelp (not Flare) for historial reasons and its language is set to English.
I appreciate that this may be a minor issue (as the concept links work after all) but I would like to understand why this is happening.
Thank you.

[Pete Lees]

Thanks. Unfortunately, I can't see anything there that would cause the behaviour you describe.

If you feel comfortable sending your .chm files to me, I'd be more than happy to take a closer look at them. Without access to the files themselves, it's quite difficult to diagnose problems like this. Send me a PM if you want to go ahead.

Pete