Topic material removed from TOC appears in Index

[ccardimon]

I am deleting all references to Topic A from our user guide. It's outdated. Okay, fine. I removed the topic itself from the TOC, so now it doesn't print out. I have not deleted the Topic itself.

I have also removed all references to Topic A from all other topics. I did a search and replace, and deleted it wherever I found it. All well and good.

Not so fast. When I generated PDF output, I found references to material from Topic A in the Index, listed as appearing on two pages. I clicked on the pages, but other material is there now.

It seems as though the Index is still seeing the material as it was.

What am I missing?

What do I have to do to *refresh* the Index?

[ccardimon]

Any help would be appreciated.

[LTinker68]

First, open the Index Explorer and make sure there aren't any entries still pointing to that file. Even though you deleted the topic, maybe the Index Explorer didn't update correctly.

Second, did you manually create the index entries or did you have Flare create them automatically after you told it what terms to look for? If you did the former, then deleting the topic should have taken care of the index. If you did the second, then I wonder if Flare is keeping a cache of that info somewhere (which would be a bug). You could try deleting the output folder before building, but that shouldn't really be a problem with PDF output. Wouldn't hurt to try, though.

[ccardimon]

First, open the Index Explorer and make sure there aren't any entries still pointing to that file. Even though you deleted the topic, maybe the Index Explorer didn't update correctly.

The Index Explorer is not updating correctly from what I've seen. I opened it and took a gander. The Index is pointing to things I have removed. Sadly, I can find no delete function connected with entries in the Index Explorer. How do I remove things that need to be removed?

Second, did you manually create the index entries or did you have Flare create them automatically after you told it what terms to look for? If you did the former, then deleting the topic should have taken care of the index. If you did the second, then I wonder if Flare is keeping a cache of that info somewhere (which would be a bug). You could try deleting the output folder before building, but that shouldn't really be a problem with PDF output. Wouldn't hurt to try, though.

I simply removed the topic from the TOC. I haven't deleted the topic itself yet. That is my next move.

[KevinDAmery]

Flare analyzes all included topics for index keywords, regardless of whether they are in the TOC or not. This makes sense in online formats (where the topic can be reached by other means than the TOC) - it's possible the indexing code is still scanning topics that are not explicitly excluded from the output target, even though in print output they won't be included if they are not in the TOC. (Which would be a bug if it's the case, imo).

Try adding an exclude condition to that topic file for your print output. (Not just in the TOC, but exclude the topic htm file itself).

[ccardimon]

Thank, Kevin. Didn't know that. Will do.

[LTinker68]

I just re-read your post and saw that you mentioned you'd removed it from the TOC. Read that wrong and thought you mean you'd deleted the topic altogether. Sorry about that.

BTW, you can also keep a topic in the output but exclude it from being searchable (via the Topic Properties screen). That won't keep the index terms from being found, but if you don't want index terms in a topic you just don't add them.

[ccardimon]

I tried using an exclude condition and the topic still appeared in the Index.

I even deleted the topic altogether -- and the topic continues to appear in the Index.

I now have a ghost topic.

I need to remove from the Index the items that were mentioned in the dearly departed topic.

Any suggestions? I'm wide open.

[SteveS]

Just for fun...

If you add a new topic and create an indexed term in it, does the new index term show up when you build? And if so, can you then delete it?

Uhm, you might want to try this on a copy of your project.

[ccardimon]

Just for fun...

If you add a new topic and create an indexed term in it, does the new index term show up when you build? And if so, can you then delete it?

Uhm, you might want to try this on a copy of your project.

How does one make a copy of a project? I have made copies of topics before, but not entire projects.