Linking to a specific topic in the HTML generated help is as easy as linking to a file named by its topics ID and placed under the “files” sub-directory of the generated content.

Let’s say you have created a project named “My help file” with a topic named “My first topic” whose topic ID is “Myfirsttopic”. When you export the project to HTML, you will have a directory structure such as the following:

  • My help files.html
  • files
    • Myfirsttopic.html
    • some other files…

Now if you want to link to that specific topic from your web site, all you have to do is create a link to the “Myfirsttopic.html” page which will automatically open the table of content if it isn’t visible.
Some of you might be wondering why their exported topic files are named with strange characters and numbers. This is the old legacy way of naming files when exporting in HelpNDoc. You can now change that in the project properties window by selecting “Topic ID” in the “Generated file name” part of the “General” options, as seen at the bottom of the following screenshot.

HelpNDoc general options

Categories: articles