Alternative to Concept Links for HTML help

[MC Hammer]

Hello everyone,
I am back with my favourite subject .
I have concept links in some slave projects that do not work when these slave projects are accessed via the TOC of the merged master project. I get the following message:

Concept_Links_msg.gif

I have implemented a concept keyword in the master project (master project does not have any concept links) so would expect the concept links to work, and these have worked in the past.

I can get them to work if I implement the workaround suggested by Pete Lees, i.e unregister hhctrl.ocx and re-register it back but it is not practical to ask our customers to do this if the "More Information" (Concept links) links do not work. Some people won't be that computer literate and it does not look good if you start asking your costumers to play with HTML components.

Have you go anything to suggest as an alternative to the concept links? Last resort would be to replace concept links by plain and simple hyperlinks to the related topics but it is not my favourite option as it is very much manual and will require me to edit every topic with concept links. Are there other help controls that would not be prone to issues similar to the ones described?
Thank you!

[Pete Lees]

Hi, Marie-Claire,

Personally, I'd be inclined to leave the links as they are, as any problem that affects your help file will also affect the other help files on your users' computers. For example, many Microsoft help files use the same HTML Help ActiveX control for linking, so these files too would be broken.

It's not very uncommon for something to break the registry entries for the HTML Help ActiveX control and so cause Concept and Related Topics links to stop working. However, this doesn't happen so often that these types of links are best avoided. For the most part, the majority of users are rarely (or even never) troubled by these issues.

But simple hyperlinks would be the way to go if you're worried about this.

Pete

[MC Hammer]

Hi Pete
Thanks for your valuable contribution. So do most link types in a HTML Help File use the same HTML ActiveX control?
It is just that I thought it would not happen that often and the three of us (in my team) got this issue so I am a bit worried when these files "hit" our customers.

[Pete Lees]

Hi, Marie-Claire,

Yes, those links that aren't just simple <a href="url"> hyperlinks are typically using Microsoft's HTML Help ActiveX control. You can set a number of different commands and parameters on this control to jump to other topic files (ALink, KLink, and Related Topics commands), open external files (Shortcut command), and more. You'll find many examples of these commands in Microsoft's Windows help, Internet Explorer help, and (until it turned away from HTML Help in the more recent versions) Office help.

It's difficult to determine just how many Windows users are affected by problems with the HTML Help control. For the most part, I only see reports of these problems in forums that are populated by Help authors. This is obviously to be expected, as Help authors are much more attuned to this type of issue than the average Windows user is. In addition, it appears that installing/upgrading/using certain help authoring tools may actually cause the issue. I'm sure that this isn't true of Flare, but some tools do try to muck around with the user's HTML Help viewer components.

Pete

[MC Hammer]

Hi Pete
Thank you for your comments and input. I will have a look at the Microsoft Help documentation.