Need to Merge .chm Files Without a TOC

[Jodie Boedigheimer]

Hello All

Way back in version 1 or 2, I asked if I could merge a .chm file into a master if the slave did not have a TOC. The answer was No.

We're now at 4.1 . . . I haven't seen anything different in 4.1 . . . not in any release notes or in the help or in options when I actually try the merge.

Background:

I have 1 master and 65 slave projects that I need to merge.

About half of the slaves have a TOC.

The other half do not have a TOC, and I don't want them to. They are CSH field help topics that don't need a TOC, yet they still need to be part of the overall help system so we can link to them via F1 and users could search for the field name if they wanted to.

I created links in the master TOC to the help projects without a TOC, hoping it might work.

The topics appeared in the project, but the TOC also looks goofy . . . all the non-toc projects were created at the same level, yet in the output, the first one is the top level, then each one under it is another level under the top one until the last one, where it says "TOC is empty" . . . I want these bogus TOC entries to not appear.

Here's what I put in the master TOC:
P Window Overviews
AP Field Help
AR Field Help

All at the same level.

When I compile the help, it appears like this:
(book) P Window overviews
(book) AP Field Help
(book) AR Field Help
(topic) TOC is empty

In RoboHELP, I could do this. We began eons ago in WinHelp and I could merge all the projects, even those without TOC entries, by manually creating the master.cnt in a text file and typing in a line for each project I wanted to include in the TOC, Index, and project itself.

Then when we converted to RH HTML, this format was retained by default. So it still worked.

When we converted from RH HTML to Flare, this went away, namely because we had to create a new master since we took the opportunity to reorganize the entire monstrous help system.

I need to be able to do this in Flare.

Any help?

Thanks
Jodie

[Pete Lees]

Hi, Jodie,

It sounds like you may need to post-process your master .chm file outside Flare. That is:

1. Build the master .chm file with Flare. Don't include in its TOC those slaves that you don't want to appear there.
2. In Windows Explorer, browse to the output folder where Flare has stored the source files for the master .chm.
3. Find the project (.hhp) file, and open it in HTML Help Workshop (available from here if you don't already have it).
4. Click Change Project Options at the top of the Project tab.
5. Click the Merge Files tab.
6. Add all the slaves, and then click OK.
7. Recompile the master .chm file by clicking Compile HTML File in the main toolbar.

Pete

[Jodie Boedigheimer]

Thank you, Pete!

That worked great