Creating the Table of Contents Manually

General Remark

The table of contents (TOC) provides a logical structure of your help content.

Common Operations

Everything that you might want to do with the TOC can easily be done with the TOC Editor . It is accessible when a project is loaded or newly created.

Clear TOC

You can delete all TOC entries by pressing Clear TOC in the toolbar. The underlying TOC file is only overwritten, if you click on Export TOC afterwards.

Export TOC

When you change something in your TOC then the Export TOC Button in the toolbar becomes activated. Before you can see the changes in the helpviewer, you should click on it or on Create All. JHelpDev then writes the contents of the TOC to the file %projectdir%/%projecttitle%TOC.xml. Refer to the JavaHelp User Guide for the specification of this file.

Import TOC

You can import the existing file from %projectdir%/%projecttitle%TOC.xml by clicking on Import TOC. The existing tree is first deleted and then created from the contents of that file.

Adding Images

You can only add images, that are in the subdirectories of the project directory and that have the suffix .gif. These images are recognized, when you do Create Map. There is a target created for each image that is not bigger than 32x32. You may use the images to mark TOC items. If the image is too big or does not exist, a log message will be generated and the image target is removed from the TOC item without further notice. You can see all valid images directly in the tree.

Empty Targets

Empty targets my well occur for parents in the tree although it also makes sense to specify targets for them. All items without a target are rendered ORANGE in the editor to visualize, which items are connected and which are not.

Invalid Targets

Invalid targets in the TOC may occur when you import from an existing TOC file with wrong targets or when you change the underlying content files by renaming ore deleting them. Invalid targets are rendered RED and you should edit them to choose a valid target from the list. Otherwise this item will not respond in the TOC of the helpviewer.

See also: Automatically Generating/Updating the Table of Contents, Naming Conventions, Import XML