Adding Links to Pages

After you have more than a handful of pages in your project, navigation becomes important. Perhaps your site, FlashFAQ, has a section about XML and Flash. You might want to link one topic to another topic in your project because they are related. You could achieve this by switching to TrueCode and entering an anchor tag . But what happens if pages moved? Or the filename changes for whatever reason? You could have a maintenance nightmare on your hands. Thankfully, RoboHelp has a feature that allows you to click a single button to link pages, without having to worry about maintenance issues.

1. Double-click an existing topic page in the Panel tab that you want to add a link to. In this case, you will link two of the XML entries, so edit the Creating an XML Packet with Flash (the easy way) in the RoboHelp WYSIWYG editor.
2. Add two blank lines at the bottom of the topic, and then click the Insert Hyperlink button (or Edit Selected Hyperlink button). RoboHelp launches the Hyperlink dialog box.
3. For this example, select an existing page within the project; however, you could easily use this same dialog box to link to an external site. If you link to an external URL (such as http://www.macromedia.com), enter a full domain name in the Link to text field. You can also enter a link to a FTP site, create an e-mail link, or even link to a file in this text field. You can use this dialog box to define whether the link opens in a frame within the page, or in its own pop-up window. Leave the hyperlink options at Page Default (none).
4. Click the Destination pop-up menu to select the folder that contains the topic you want to link to, because you want to link to another topic within the project. After you select the folder, a list of available topics appears in the pane below the pop-up.
5. Select an existing topic to automatically fill in the Link to text field. For this example, select Creating an XML Packet in Flash (the hard way). RoboHelp also provides a preview of the page in the Preview pane, which lets you confirm any page that you link to.
6. Click OK to close the dialog box and display the hyperlink.

Now you can easily add “related” cross-references to the bottom of each of your existing entries, so users can quickly find similar topics. If you change the location of a page in RoboHelp, such as moving it to a new folder or into a new category, any links to that page in your project automatically update.