TOCs Merge but Indices Won't

[TomTatham]

I have a number of Flare projects that generate .CHM output and I also have a master help file that merges the CHMs together. The scheme was working fine until I move all of the files to a new computer with a different directory structure. I also did a great deal of internal editing and reorganization of the projects. I then changed the paths within the master CHMs TOC file and compiled. The TOCs from the various files merge, but the indices don't merge. I have tried creating a new master TOC from scratch, but with the same result. I can also create a brand new CHM, reference it in the Master CHM and the new CHM's index appears as expected. Any suggestions as to what might be preventing the indices from merging?

[Pete Lees]

Hi, Tom,

If you can find the HTML Help project (.hhp) file for the master help file and open this in Notepad or HTML Help Workshop, this may provide a clue as to where the problem lies.

The master .hhp file should contain a MERGE FILES section that lies all the slave help files that you want to merge into the master. From your description, it sounds as if the correct files are listed in this section, but perhaps you've specified the absolute path to them. When this is the case, the file merging should work OK on your development machine but not on any other machine where the folder structure is different. So, you need to specify relative paths, or preferably no path information at all (just the file names).

There are a couple of other things that be relevant:

• When you first view the index of a master .chm file, the help viewer creates a .chw file. This is a binary representation of the complete index, designed to speed up the display of keywords in a very large index. If the .chw file has been corrupted for any reason then I suspect that you won't see all the index keywords that you'd expect to see. So, you might try deleting the .chw file and then reopening the master .chm file.
• Index (and full-text search) merging doesn't work across more than one level of .chm file. So, if you merge help file A into B, and then merge file B into C, the index keywords in A will not show up in C's index.

Pete

[Richard Ferrell]

Do you binary index turned on?

[TomTatham]

Problem solved. The source of the problem was that the project files had different names than the compiled output. I had erroneously assumed that Flare could automatically handle that scenario. I renamed the project files to match the output and now everything works.