### 9.8.5 Providing mid-topic contents links in HTML Help

If you provide mid-topic links in the TOC, you lose contents tracking of your current location in the Help system. And if you specify a binary TOC in HTML Help Workshop (which you must do to enable certain HTML Help features), mid-topic entries in the TOC become relatively useless. These are known HTML Help problems; Mif2Go cannot fix them.

Why not to include mid-topic links in the TOC

Providing mid-topic links in the TOC is generally not a good idea, for the following reasons:

• You cannot include any HTML Help features (such as built-in browse buttons) that require a binary TOC.

• The HTML Help window is usually small, perhaps six words per line; scrolling around in a multi-topic page can take a long time.

• Loss of synchronization can mystify users.

No binary TOC with mid-topic links

If you specify a binary TOC in HTML Help workshop, and you have mid-topic links in the TOC, the name of the last TOC link to a given topic file becomes the name of all links to the file, unless you use the following settings for all but the first heading:

[HTMLStyles]

Midtopichead=Contents NoContLink

However, with this setting the mid-topic entries are no longer active links, which is likely to annoy users.

If you must have mid-topic links in the TOC

If you are willing to give up synchronization to get drill-down, and your project does not require a binary TOC, do the following:

1. In [HtmlStyles], assign property Split only to H1-level heading formats; assign property Contents to other heading formats.

2. Set the following option:

[MSHtmlHelpOptions]

; ContentsNamesFileOnly = Yes (default, allows tracking)

; or No (allows direct mid-topic jumps to points within files,

; but disables tracking)

ContentsNamesFileOnly=No

3. Avoid HTML Help features that require a binary TOC, and make sure your help project file (.hhp file) does not specify Binary TOC=Yes.

TOC entries reference points inside .htm files (that is, the links have #place suffixes), so you can drill down into the file via the TOC; but TOC entries no longer synchronize with topic content.

| 9.8.4 Configuring contents entries for HTML Help |  | 9.8.6 Making the TOC track index links in HTML Help |