Merge Setting Basics
Table of Contents
Merged Help
Merged Help is a WebWorks Help specific term for a helpset comprised of many helpsets. This is a little vague outside the scope of ePublisher, so lets consider Merged Help with the following definition:
- Merged Help
- Any project that has more than one top level group in the ePublisher Document Manager.
With this in mind, the Merge Settings under Format -> Merge Settings allows you to organize how your merged or global TOC groups content. You can do things like rename group levels to proper titles and set context for groups. In general the merge settings are available as a way of balancing the document manager's ability to organize a project and creating pleasing output.
The Document Manager
The merge settings are specifically related to the Document Manager. The Document Manager is where you organize a project.
The Document Manager has no impact on the TOC
The only time the Document Manager creates an entry in the TOC is when it is a top level group and merged help (remember, the helpset for all the top level groups combined) is viewed.
The Document Manager does have an impact on what the output filesystem hierarchy will look like. For example:
Document Manager top level groups WWHelpDocs ePubDocs AutoMapDocs ExpressDocs Output file system C:/output/docs/WWHelpDocs C:/output/docs/ePubDocs C:/output/docs/AutoMapDocs C:/output/docs/ExpressDocs TOC of Output [+] WWHelpDocs [+] ePubDocs [+] AutoMapDocs [+] ExpressDocs
The obvious shortcoming of just using the Document Manager is a name that might be better for the filesystem such as "WWHelpDocs" does not make a good title in the TOC. It would be better to have something like "WebWorks Help Documentation". Merge Settings to the rescue!
The Merge Settings
As we can see from the example above, we will use the Merge Settings to fix our titles in the TOC. The Merge Settings will display a list of the top level groups. If you select a group two text boxes will be enabled to the right. The first text box is the "Table of contents title" and this is how you will set the group "WWHelpDocs" to be "WebWorks Help Documentation" in the TOC. Additionally, you can assign a new "Group context" value for each group in your project, which is useful in context-sensitive help implementations.
At the top of the Merge Settings dialog there a text box for the "Merge Title". This sets the "title" tag of the web page, which is what defines the text that shows up in the window border of the browser. For example, in the browser window you have open now, the title bar should have "WebWorks Wiki" somewhere.
Extra Grouping
The merge settings also allow you to add pseudo entries that the top level groups can be added to. For example, if I had 10 top level groups and I wanted to place each into two groups, I could do the following by creating a new entry in the merge settings:
My First Main Group
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---- Top Level Group 1
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---- Top Level Group 2
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---- Top Level Group 4
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---- Top Level Group 3
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---- Top Level Group 5
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---- Top Level Group 6
My Second Main Group
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---- Top Level Group 9
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---- Top Level Group 7
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---- Top Level Group 10
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---- Top Level Group 8The two "Main Group" entries were added in the merge settings and the top level groups were added respectively. Also, as you can see from the example, the groups were reorganized and placed in a different order. This will all be applied to the TOC in the output.