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Chuck Martin reports: <<I'm still struggling with Word's indexing... I'm
getting duplicate first-level entries in a document that's generated by
RoboHelp X4.1, although I don't think that it being generated by RH should
make a difference.>>
I'm not using X4, but here's a guess based on some of the settings and
glitches I've encountered in previous versions: First, RH has what it calls
a "smart indexing" wizard (which I've never used because computers can't do
indexes right... not yet, leastwise). If this has been turned on by default
in some obscure preferences dialog or enabled in some equally obscure
Project setting, that would certainly explain your problem. Do a bit of
digging in both likely and unlikely places and see whether you can disable
this wizard.
Second, RH Classic 9.x has a bug in the indexing feature, in which the Index
tab for a topic's properties dialog box doesn't always show all the terms
that are actually listed under the K (keyword) footnote for that topic. No
idea where these come from, but they're easy to fix if you're careful. After
editing an index, open the footnotes window and manually remove any
duplicate or spurious entries. That may be your problem. I've always been a
bit leery about mucking about under the hood with highly automated software
such as RH, but this particular bit of skullduggery has been perfectly safe
in my experience--provided you don't muck up the punctuation in the footnote
(have a close look at how the keywords are separated before you edit them).
As an example of obscure settings, I recently revised a help project in RH
Classic to include the new versions of screenshots. When I compiled the
project, I got a warning about transparent graphics. "Huh? I never use
transparent graphics." But sure enough, when I took a close look at the
dialog box for inserting a graphic, the "make graphic transparent" checkbox
had been selected. (Note the use of the passive voice here. _I'd_ certainly
never do something so stupid. <g>*)
* And if you believe that, I've got some lovely swamp property in downtown
Kapuskasing that's for sale.
Another time, I kept getting the wrong Map IDs: spent an hour updating them
to conform with a standard I'd written to ensure consistency between
projects, yet there was RH, helpfully renumbering all my manually entered
IDs. A bit of head scratching and a search through the tabs of the Project
settings revealed that the "autogenerate Map IDs" checkbox had been selected
by default. Guess I missed that. Unchecking it solved the problem quite
nicely.
--Geoff Hart, ghart -at- [delete]videotron -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my
telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my
telephone."--Bjarne Stroustrup (originator of C++ programming language)
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