Unused Topic Keywords

There is a Robohelp report which lists Unused keywords. This is currently listing Unused Topic Keywords. These keywords are not visible in the Index Pod, so how do you identify where they are, and how to get rid of them?
Help keeps referring to an "Index Designer" - what/where is this?
Regards

It is strange for the report to highlight an unused keyword that is not displayed in the Index Pod. Would the unused keywords be topic level keywords rather than index file keywords?
BTW the "Index Designer" mentioned refers to the Index Pod - this is I think a bit of a throw back to previous versions.
The RoboColum(n)
@robocolumn
Colum McAndrew

Similar Messages

What is the difference between Topic Keywords and Index File Keywords?

What is the difference between Topic Keywords and Index File Keywords? Any advantages to using one over the other? Do they appear differently in the generated index?
RH9.0.2.271
I'm using Webhelp

Hi there
When you create a RoboHelp project you end up with many different ancillary files that are used to store different bits of information. Many of these files bear the name you assigned to the project at the time you created it. The index file has the project name and it ends with a .HHK file extension. (HHK meaning HTML Help Keywords)
Generally, unless you change RoboHelp's settings, you add keywords to this file and associate topics to the keywords via the Index pod. At the time you compile a CHM or generate other types of output, the file is consulted and the index is built.
As I said earlier, the default is to add keywords to the Index file until you configure RoboHelp to add the keywords to the topics themselves. Once you change this, any keyword added will become a META tag in the topic code. If your keyword is BOFFO, the META tag would look like this:
<meta name="MS-HKWD" content="BOFFO" />
When the help is compiled or generated, the Index (.HHK) file is consulted as normal, but any topics containing keywords added in this manner are also added to the Index you end up with. From the appearance perspective, the end user woudn't know the difference or be able to tell. Heck, if all you ever did was interact with the Index pod, you, as an author wouldn't know either. Well, other than the fact that the icons appear differently.
Operationally, keywords added to the topics themselves may hold an advantage in that if you were to import these topics into other projects, the Index keywords would already be present.
Hopefully this helps... Rick

Getting topic keywords into the index

Hi,
How do you get topic keywords from one or more topics into
the index? Is there some way to scan the .HTM files in a project
and pick up all the keywords that are defined in the topics (but
may not be in the Index)? My index got wiped out, and I want to
rebuild it from the topic keywords in the topics in the RoboHelp
project.
Thanks,
John B.

Hi Rick,
The topic keywords are in the topics as meta tags, but
closing and re-opening the project doesn't cause them to appear in
the Index pane...um..pod?. They refuse to be coaxed. Any other
ideas?
BTW, the keywords do show up in the compiled help index...
which is confusing to me because they are not in the RH index, and
they are not in the .HHK file (it's empty). And a file I found
(rhkkeyword.apj) is also devoid of keywords. Does the help compiler
know how to build an index from the meta tags in the .HTM files
themselves?
Thanks,
John B

Convert from index file keywords to topic keywords

I'd like to store keywords in the topics instead of having
them in a central index file.
For legacy help systems, is there a way of moving the
keywords from the .HHK file into the .HTM topics?
Thanks,
Salan

Hi Salan,
I'm afraid I have some bad news for you: There is no
automatic way to do this in RoboHelp. You have to do it by hand. I
had a discussion about this with eHelp (back in Oct. 2003...). I
could forward the email to you, if you wish. A quote:
"We do have request 6390 submitted to our R&D department
asking to address this issue. I created an inquiry under your
record and tied it to this request. This way in the event that this
is a addressed in a service release or next version you will be
notified. "
I guess this was with X3, but I never heard anything after
that, and I doubt very much that the various new owners would have
prioritized this issue.
Anyway, if anyone else knows of an efficient way to do this,
please post it, because this is STILL an issue for my team!
Regards,
Eileen

How can I delete topic index keywords that are no longer associated with a topic?

I am trying to clean up the index of an older Robohelp project before it becomes part of a merged webhelp project. I do not want to include any of its index keywords or topic keywords. I've managed to remove most of them, but I have a group of troublesome entries that refuse to go away. In fact, they cause RH8 to crash. I am running Windows XP.
Looking at the code in Visual Studio, it appears that an instruction is pointing to field which contains "zero". (see image below)
I have tried creating a new index and deleting the old index, but RH just keeps adding these topic keywords (in bold typeface) to the new index. If the keywords are no longer associated with a topic, where is RH storing these disassociated keywords? If I open the .hhk, it is empty.

Not sure why RH crashed when deleting a portion of the topic keywords manuall
y from the index pane, but I was finally able to remove them with the Remove Unused Keywords tool. Duh! Thanks anyway!

Pulling keywords from Index and putting them at bottom of topics

I have a variable in my topic template that displays the last modified date of the topic like this:
<p class=footertext><span style="font-size: x-small; font-style: italic; x-condition: Not_Print;">Last
modified: <variable name=date x-format=default x-constant=TRUE x-value=40381.572928>July 23, 2010</variable></span>
I don't recall where I got it from, but I'm sure it was in this forum. I'm wondering if whoever wrote that knows how to create a similar variable that would grab the index keywords from the topic (e.g., <meta name=MS-HKWD content="System Requirements">, <meta name=MS-HKWD content="Exchange Server 2007">, etc.) and paste them at the bottom of the topic like this: "Keywords: System Requirements, Exchange Server 2007" (An example of something similar is in our knowledgebase articles: http://kb.globalscape.com/KnowledgebaseArticle10369.aspx, but they use the term "Tags." That's "canned" software, so I don't know how they did it, except that I have to type the tags one at a time in a form that populates the bottom of the article.)
WHY? Because I have all the keywords anyone would possibly want to search for (I hope) in various topics (which were entered manually or with Smart Index), but the only words that get results in the search are words that are actually IN the article. The words appear in the Index, as expected, and link to the proper article, as expected, but typing the word in the Search box in WebHelp does not return the article unless the word is displayed in the article. Some people use different words for the same idea, so they might not always search on the word that is in the article. (e.g., .bat, batch file, script, vbs, code, command...) So the simplest solution is to add the list of keywords at the bottom of the topic, but there are 1000s of topics and I'd rather not do that manually. (And no, I don't want to use ZoomSearch or other 3rd-party tools, thereby negating the "single-source" idea.)
OH, for those of you who prefer to ask questions rather than answer them: I'm using RoboHelp 7 on Windows XP and generating WebHelp, HTMLHelp, Word docs, and JavaHelp. My computer has all of the latest updates and fixes for all of my software. Everything in the help works absolutely perfect, I just want to know how/if it's possible to create a variable as I describe.
Thanks for any and all assistance!
Karla

As a forum member who "prefer[s] to ask questions rather than answer them," have you read the "Index Basics" topic in the RH 8 help?
In there, you'll see that Index keywords and Topic keywords are different:
Topic keywords appear the same as index file (HHK) keywords, but they are stored within individual HTML topics.
Index file keywords are saved in the project index file (HHK) rather than in the code of individual HTML topics.
Unless you can find some technical resource in your organization, your assessment of a manual solution is probably accurate. For an automated solution, you would need to run some type of script (before or after runtime?) to pull the Index keyword from the HHK file and place it inside the topic.
For example, the Index keyword, the topic title, and the topic file name all appear in the HHK in this manner:
<item name="Add-on Premium">
<section name="Add-on Premium for Derivatives Exposure" link="add-on.htm">
</section>
</item>
Another question: have you considered cross-references or user-defined variables in the Index? (See the "Add and link index keywords" help topic.) That's another manual solution, but would require less maintenance issues in the future.
Good luck,
Leon

Mixing Topic & Index Keywords

We recently converted old .hlp files to .chm. When we did the
conversion, it created a mix of topic and index keywords. For some
reason, when we generate, only the topic keywords show up in the
.chm. Does anyone know how to get both keyword types to show
up?

Hi, kfielder,
Can you check your help project folder for one or more index
(.hhk) files and verify that at least one of them contains the
index keywords that you want to add to the help file? And that this
.hhk file is the one that you specify in your CHM project settings
and window definitions?
If you open the project (.hhp) file in Notepad, you should
find that the .hhk file is referenced in the OPTIONS section...
[OPTIONS]
Index file=Example.hhk
...and in the WINDOWS section:
[WINDOWS]
main=,"Example.hhc","Example.hhk", ...
The same .hhk file would normally be referenced in both
cases, but you do have the option to create multiple indexes and
associate each one with a different window.
It's necessary to create a binary index when including
keywords from both the topic files and the .hhk file, but the fact
that your topic keywords are showing up in the index suggests that
you're already creating this.
Pete

How to force topics to be ranked higher in Search?

I am using RH9. I have read the articles about how Search results are ranked:
In order, it is based on the search word appearing in:
The topic title (as in Topic Properties and not to be confused with the Topic Heading)
The topic keywords (Increasing the frequency of a word as a keyword will not help as it will be considered only once.)
The topic headings in descending order so the word appearing in H1 will take precedence over the word appearing in H2
The body of the topic. Each occurrence of a word in topic is summed to calculate overall weighting of a word in a topic.
However this does not seem to be the case for me. I have a topic called "Supported Chart Types" that I would like ranked 1st when searching on "chart". However, it is ranked 22nd despite the fact that the word "chart" appears in the topic title and 18 times in the body (and is a keyword). The #1 ranked topic for this search term is "chart layer" which has the term appearing once in the topic title and only 6 times in the body (and has no keywords). Does anyone know why this is happening? Does anyone know how we can influence the ranking so that topics we decide are more important rank at the top?

Thanks Colum
Forgot to mention that. Indeed you would also want to ensure you include an Index keyword pointing to the desired topic.
Another way to increase rank and stack the deck to favor a specific topic would be to have some hidden text in the topic formatted as Heading 1. Heading 1 terms are assigned more weight than basic text or lower headings.
The bottom line is that this is somewhat of a "Black Art" and there are many different ways to manipulate the data to achieve specific outcomes.
Cheers... Rick

How can I uncheck "Binary Index" if I have already disabled all keywords?

A week or so ago, I asked a question about the binary index and how to delete topic keywords so I could uncheck the box on the "Project Settings" page. I received a great, helpful response: "
First, click View > Pods > Project Manager.
Locate the Index folder and expand it.
Double-click the Index entry in the folder to open the Index Designer.
Scan the topics listed in the top part of the Index Designer. You are looking for any topic that has a Page icon with a Key superimposed."
So I did all of this, and it worked great for all of my projects but one. I have deleted all of the keywords, but I still am unable to uncheck the box. Anything else anyone can suggest that I do? Anywhere else I should be looking, or something I may be missing?
Thanks!

Hello again
Nothing like a user name of SouthRiverTech to tell us you have been drinking the Iconlogic water!
By chance does this project have a funny icon in your table of contents? One that looks like this?
If so, that indicates a merge. My thought here is that if you have this, the project may be forcing a binary index as those are required if merging CHM files.
Cheers... Rick
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Broken links with index keywords

Using RH 8, I have 20 broken links associated with index keywords. can someone advise how to easily get rid of these broken links?
Many thanks

I assume you are talking about links to index keywords rather than unused index keywords. If so, you have references to those index keywords somewhere inside your project. Your options are to repair the links or remove the references. If you right click on each broken link there are options to Edit, Restore and Show References which will help you find out what is going on.
The RoboColum(n)
@robocolumn
Colum McAndrew

Desperate - How can I delete an entire index at once?

I have accidentally entered the index references for a quarterly into the 'topics' panel when they should have been inthe 'reference' panel. (Darned radio buttons....)
There are dozens of entries and deleting them individually from the index will take ages. Surely there must be some way to remove all of the markings/topic entries without having to select each one individually and go through that process?
I have tried to find help items on how to do it, but have had no luck. This think has to be ready for proofing tomorrow and I'm getting exhausted trying to figure out what to do.
There must be a way! Please, can anyone help?!
Thanks so much if you can; you are a lifesaver.
Lesley

If they are just topics without references just choose "Remove Unused Topics" from the index panel flyout menu.
If you want to get rid of all references, too, then this script should do it. It goes up to two levels deep, if you need more, let me know.
myDoc = app.activeDocument
alert(myDoc.indexes[0].topics[0].topics[0].pageReferences.length)
for(var j= 0;myDoc.indexes[0].topics.length>j;j++){
myDoc.indexes[0].topics[j].pageReferences.everyItem().remove()
for(var h= 0;myDoc.indexes[0].topics[j].topics.length>h;h++){
myDoc.indexes[0].topics[j].topics[h].pageReferences.everyItem().remove()

Why does reindex documents at Server in the Configuration Manager break the help system?

Background:
So, I have a nice hosted help system on Server 9. I'm using the Access database since it's a light load project. It works OK. All admin features work OK (except groups and users bug, unrelated), including reports on search and usage. So, I have been having a devil of a time making a particular search term work in my project: UTS. It's an acronym for a system at my work, and it's important that users be able to search on it. UTS is in several Heading 1s. It's not in the stop list as a typo. Just to be sure, I deleted the whole stop list. I added "UTS" as a topic keyword. It still refuses to find any results. Also, I've noticed some other peculiarities with search: the "context" displayed below the search result is supposed to show the word you searched for in its context, but it never does in my search results. It just shows the first words of the document it's listed as a hit in search. The search is not bad, but these two bugs were odd enough to me to start rooting around for solutions.
So, I run Server 9 on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Tomcat 7 and JDK 7u17.
The problem:
I noticed in all the Server documentation that Adobe crows about the wonderful full text search powered by Lucene, and how it's checked "on" by default in all contexts. It's not in mine. When I check "reindex documents at server," it breaks the project. Literally--Server can't find the project anymore, web calls come back with no answer. Uncheck the box, A-OK. So, why is this wonderful search technology not available to me? Is it because it's not available when using default Access? Or is something else going on here?
many thanks in advance.
David Morgan
Robohelp HTML11/Server 9 user

The problem is that my data collection software (VisualPlant by EMT) is unable to browse to the National Instruments.LookoutOPCServer. When I added an Identification category to the registry entry for the lookout OPC server I was able to connect but with some odd behavior. My setup is:
2 machines each running Win NT4 SP6a. One machine is running Lookout as well as several other OPC servers. The other is running my data collection software. I am able to connect to lookout using several client apps on my data collection machine (Kepware's Quick Client, and Matrikon's Client), however my data collection software (VisualPlant) cannot see Lookout. Using the NI server explorer and viewing the properties of all of my OPC servers I noticed that Lookout was the on
ly one listed that did not have a CatID. By modifying the registry and adding the ID's listed in my original note I was able to connect using VisualPlant, however this exibited some odd behavior. It appears that adding this setting prevents multiple OPC connections to Lookout. If you have any suggestions I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks.

Indexing - Out of Sequence and Missing Page Numbers

I have a 296 page book. This is an on-going project and has been updated many times.
Two new sections have been added to this book. I have marked words for indexing.
My problem is that many of the page numbers are repeated or out-of-sequence.
For example: Intake Manifolds 66, 67, 68, 69, 68, 87, 68, 69, 186, 189, 203
This is one item that is not in the new sections, so this should not have changed.
I also have noticed missing page numbers. I verified a 'Helmets & Accessories' marker on page 248 of the new section, but it doesn't show up in the index at all.
Does anyone have any idea what could cause this? I have searched the net for others having the same issues, but I haven't found many.
IDCS4 on Mac Pro.
Thanks.
Randy

We are having the same problem! I'm using ID CS4 6.0.1 on a 1.8 GHz PowerPC G5 running OS X 10.5.6. For example, see below. The * represents a missing page number.
Axle, Rear
Alignment 163
Fastener Torque 15
Magnetic Drain Plugs 28, 51, 27, 45 [note how out of sequence these are!!]
Preventive Maintenance *, 145
CS3 was finally fixed by an Adobe patch, and as far as indexing big books went, became as solid as a rock. But now they have broken it again!! It is killing us, because we've switched 20 computers to CS4 only and updated all of our files, so we can't go back!
The only thing that seems to work is to find problem files and open the Index palette and click the Update Preview button. THEN you run your index, and sometimes it's fixed. A couple of "bad" files can spoil the whole barrel, but it's impossible to figure out which ones are bad, or even why they're bad. And when you finally fix one problem, by using the Update Preview button or by blowing away index markers and re-doing them, and getting rid of unused topics, the SAME PROBLEM will appear in other places related to other files in your book, that were "good" before!!!
Jeff Syrop
Technical Writer

Bug Report Bounced Back

I went to
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform
I reported that the function to remove unused index keywords
is not working in Robohelp 7 (or at least my installation). The
form submission was bounced back with the message: " The e-mail
account does not exist at the organization this message was sent
to."
I have submitted reports of many serious bugs in Robohelp 7
(including one bug that crashes the application), yet I have no
idea if they get through to anyone who cares, or if Adobe will be
fixing the problems.

When you successfully submit a request or a bug, that comes
to us (the Robohelp team) and we verify the same. In case you find
any problem in reporting a bug, you can send across an email
detailing the bug directly to me at [email protected]
Cheers,
Akshay
Product Manager - Adobe RoboHelp

Link Controls Problem

I am using RoboHelp HTML X5.0.2 and Word 2003 on Windows XP
platform. Topics are created in Word 2003 and then link controls
(See Also, Related Topics, Keyword Search) added in the WYSIWYG
editor. Everything works fine until a topic is subsequently edited
in Word 2003 after which all the link controls "disappear". The
controls still show up in the WYSIWYG editor but will not work
until I re-do the links. I am in the early stages of a huge project
and am testing various options to see how future changes can be
managed. The odd thing is that the first time I tried the procedure
on a topic with Related Topics link I saw a large red "X" in Word
and a topic with a Keyword Search link appeared to be unaffected.
This makes me wonder if there is a setting in Word which can be
adjusted to prevent this problem. Has anyone else encountered this
issue? Does anyone have any suggestions?

Hi Rick,
Actually your questions is quite reasonable but I just spent
a considerable amount of time explaining how I came to be using
this method when everything "disappeared" aos I will have to start
over!
Currently, our reference and training documentation (which is
created and maintained in Lotus Notes) is provided to our clients
in the form of multiple printed binders. The goal is to now provide
all this documentation on a single CD. Since the software we are
documenting runs on a Unix platform and our clients have a wide
mixture of computing environments, WebHelp seems like the best
output format.
The easiest means of exporting the documents from Notes is as
PDF’s and since RoboHelp can import PDF’s it seemed
like the best tool for the job. However, when the documents are
imported into RoboHelp everything is fine except for the tables.
Unfortunately, all of our screen prints are in table format and all
of the spacing is stripped in the tables which makes the screen
prints unreadable and useless. (We are talking about hundreds of
documents and probably thousands of screen prints!) The problem
seems to lie with the conversion process from PDF to HTML as I
tried various other conversion tools and all had the same results.
My first solution was to bring the PDF documents into
RoboHelp as baggage files. Although a fairly tedious and
time-consuming process, it seemed like the answer but there are a
couple of major drawbacks. First of all, linking cannot be done at
the document level to cross reference between reference and how-to
documents. (I was able to work around this to some extent by
creating navigation topics for each software module which could be
linked to each other to provide linking at a “group”
level.) But the biggest deficiency is the inability to do full-text
searches which would be a major advantage of changing to the
electronic format.
At this point, since I already had exported the documents as
PDF’s, I considered using Adobe Acrobat instead of RoboHelp
but this did not turn out to be a workable solution.
So, I decided to return to RoboHelp using a different method
of getting the documents out of Notes. Notes can export documents
to RTF format but it means opening each document individually
(whereas multiple documents can be exported to PDF from a
“View” without opening each document). I tried various
methods including opening the RTF document in Word and saving as
HTML (formatting got messed up), opening the RTF document in Word,
saving as DOC and importing into RoboHelp (way too cumbersome a
process when each document is separate and even using RoboHelp for
Word to import the RTF documents directly (didn’t like it
– sorry – and also had formatting issues).
Finally, I devised a method of creating the topics (in
RobobHelp TOC) using Word 2003. I would then copy the contents of
the Notes document, paste into the Word topic and save it. (I did
try pasting contents directly into WYSIWYG editor but all
formatting was lost – which is why I am using Word!!!)
Although that may sound tedious, time consuming and cumbersome, it
actually took about the same amount of time as using the baggage
file method and, more importantly, it worked great! Topics look
fine, full-text searches work and links can be placed on individual
documents for cross referencing – which of course needs to be
done in the WYSIWYG editor.
Before proceeding too far, I decided to test what would
happen in the future when documents need to be replaced with
updated versions. And that brings us to my current problem. If a
document containing link controls is edited in Word, the link
controls added in WYSIWYG will no longer function. It seems like
the only way to fix this is to re-open the topic in the WYSIWYG
editor, actually re-do at least one of the links and then re-save
the topic.
Sorry for this lengthy response but perhaps you will have a
better understanding of why I am experiencing the problem. I am
open to suggestions if anyone knows of a better approach to this
project.
Thanks.

Unused Topic Keywords

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