Normally, you will want your topic files to have entries in your Table of Contents (TOC). Topic files that you create in the TOC section of the Project Explorer automatically have TOC entries.

1.Click in the TOC in the Project Explorer at the position where you want to add your new topic.

2.Select Project > Add Topic and choose an Add Topic option OR

Right-click to display the context menu and then select an Add Topic option

3.This displays the Insert New Topic dialog, select Topic/Chapter to create a normal topic with content.:

4.Type your title in the Topic Heading: field (this is the title that appears in the TOC). The Topic ID is generated automatically and is initially based on the caption you enter. You can edit the automatically-generated topic ID if you like – see Topic IDs and context numbers for more details.

See the Insert New Topic for details of the settings displayed by More . Note that you cannot select Popup as the Topic Class when you are adding topics to the TOC. Popups should not have TOC entries so you must create popup topics in the Topic Files section.

5.Click on OK to create the topic.

Initially the header of the topic above the editing area will be identical to the caption. If you edit the caption in the TOC the header will change with the caption. However, if you edit the header this will turn off the "link" between the caption and the header. Any changes made to the caption after this will no longer be reflected in the header.

You can also create a new topic by dragging & dropping text to the Table of Contents (TOC), in the same way that you create hyperlinks:

1.Select the text in a topic that you want to use for the topic caption.

2.Drag the text into the TOC between two topics, in the position where you want the new topic to be inserted.

A blue line is displayed between the TOC entries in the position where the new topic will be inserted.

3.Let go of the mouse button. A new topic will be created with the selected text as the caption.

This option can create two types of links:

Link to a topic in this project:

Creates an additional link to an existing topic in the current project. See Multiple TOC entries for one topic for more details on this subject.

Link to a web address:

Instead of displaying a topic this displays a web page with the URL you enter here. You must include the http:// prefix if the address, otherwise it won't work.

After creating the TOC entry you can specify the target of the link on the right:

TOC link targets in different output formats:

Important: this option is for CHM help systems only. It cannot be used for any other format.

This option displays a topic from another CHM file that must be in the same folder as the CHM file containing the link when the CHM file is displayed. The topic is displayed at runtime, not while you are editing.

1.Select the project from which the CHM file containing the topic will be created.
The project name must be exactly the same as the CHM name!

2.Select the topic you want to include from the drop-down list and click on OK.

3.The editor then displays the link information instead of the topic. Select Main as the target help window for displaying the topic.

This option is for creating modular projects. It inserts a reference to another Help+Manual project, which will then be merged into the the current project when you publish. The project is inserted at the position of the reference in the TOC. The result is the same as if you were publishing a single project.

See the Modular Projects chapter for full details.

Check for duplicate topic IDs

Important: None of the projects you combine may contain any duplicate topic IDs! If they do, you will get errors in the published documentation.

Basic procedure:

1.Select the project you want to insert.

2.Select the merge mode. Merge on publishing creates a single integrated documentation and is the standard. Merge at runtime is for CHM only and merges an external CHM file at runtime.

CHM runtime merge requirements:

•The target CHM file must be in the same folder as the main CHM file when it is displayed.

•The target CHM file must have exactly the same name as the project from which it is created.

1.Proceed as described above for creating a new topic.

2.In the Insert New Topic dialog select the Multiple Topics option.

3.Enter captions in the Item Captions editing box. Use the indent tools on the right to indent captions, which makes them sub-topics of the topic above them. The  button un-indents captions. You can also use the TAB key to indent entries to turn them into sub-topics.

4.Click on OK to create the topics.

Note that when you use this method the topic IDs are all generated automatically from the topic captions. You can edit the IDs afterwards if you want.

You can use content templates for topics to automatically insert a basic layout, including any content (text, graphics, tables etc.) when you create a new topic. If you have already created one or more topic content templates in your project directory you can select them when you create the topic.

•Select the template you want to use in the Topic Template: field.

•Templates will only be defined if you have created them by saving topics in your project directory as XML template files, using the naming syntax topicname.template.xml, with the File > Save Topic to File in Project > Manage Topics.

See Content templates for topics for full details on creating and using topic content templates.