November 2000: Creating Glossaries
This Help Corner column was originally published in November, 2000, and written for RoboHELP Office Version 9.
by Char James-Tanny
Creating Glossaries
Create a Glossary topic in your project if you are producing WebHelp, JavaHelp, or Oracle Help.
As mentioned earlier, you can use the Glossary tab and take advantage of expanding hotspots for WebHelp when viewed through Internet Explorer. However, the expanding hotspots will be expanded in JavaHelp, Oracle Help, and WebHelp when viewed through Netscape.
You can maintain the Glossary tab when producing these outputs and then use copy and paste to create the Glossary topic. However, the information must be maintained manually. There isn't any way to automatically update a Glossary topic from the Glossary tab.
When creating a Glossary topic, you can use either the dynamic or text-only popup. Your decision depends on the formatting you want to use. You can only control the foreground and background colors, font family, and font attributes in text-only popups, but you can use Cascading Style Sheets for dynamic popups.
While the topic will look similar to that created in RoboHELP Classic, there are differences in development:
- If you want to use buttons, you can use graphical buttons or you can use the HTML Help Related Topics control.
- Use bookmarks to create links between the navigational buttons and the Glossary content. To insert a bookmark, type the Glossary headings in the topic. Select Insert | Bookmark or click the Insert Bookmark icon. The Bookmark dialog box displays and the text in the Name field defaults to the text on the current line. Accept this text or type a new bookmark.
- Non-scrolling regions don't exist in HTML, although you can mimic the effect with frames. However, please be careful when doing this and verify all results. Use "Back to the Top" links next to each heading so that users can get back to the navigational buttons without scrolling.
For example, the following graphic shows a sample Glossary topic in RoboHELP HTML. The buttons were created with the Related Topic control.
Copyright © 2000 Char James-Tanny.
