WebHelp Classic System

Layout of the WebHelp Classic System Interface

The layout of the WebHelp Classic system is comprised of the following components:

Left Pane or Frame

This section on the left side of the help system includes the following tabs:

Content

A typical table of contents style presentation of your content. You can use the Expand all/Collapse all buttons to expand or collapse all the topics presented in the Table of Contents.

Note

You can enhance the appearance of items in the Table of Contents. See the Customizing WebHelp Classic Systems chapter for more details.

Index

Presents the index terms for your content. If your content does not contain any indexterm elements, this tab is not generated.

Search Results

This tab is generated when the Search field is used. It presents the search results in the form of links to topics where the search terms are found, along with a rating scheme for each result. For more details, see the Search Feature section.

Upper Pane or Frame

The upper section of the help system includes the following features:

Search Field

Use this feature to perform searches in your content. When you enter search terms in this field, the results are displayed in the Search Results tab in the left section of the help system, along with a rating scheme for each result. For more details, see the Search Feature section.

Frames Option

Click on this option to display the output rendered in HTML frames.

Print Option

Opens a dialog box with various printing options and a print preview.

Navigation Links

You can navigate through the content of your output using the navigation links or arrows in the upper-right part of the page. These arrows allow you to move to the Parent topic, Previous topic, or Next topic. Links to the parent topics of the currently opened topic are also presented at the top of the page.

Note

You can edit the args.hide.parent.link parameter to hide the Parent, Next, and Previous links.

Main Pane or Frame

The content of the help pages are rendered and displayed in this main section.

WebHelp Classic Output

Search Feature

When you enter search terms in the Search field at the top of the help system, the results are displayed in the Search Results tab in the left section, along with a rating scheme for each result. When you click on a result in the Search Results tab, the search terms are highlighted in the main pane. If you click Enter with the Search field empty, the highlights are removed.

The Search feature is also enhanced with a rating mechanism that computes scores for every page that matches the search criteria. These scores are then translated into a 5-star rating scheme. The search results are sorted depending on the following:

• The number of keywords found in a single page (the higher the number, the better).
• The context (for example, a word found in a title scores better than a word found in unformatted text). The search ranking order, sorted by relevance is as follows:
  • The search phrase is included in a meta keyword
  • The search phrase is in the title of the page
  • The search phrase is in bold text in a paragraph
  • The search phrase is in normal text in a paragraph

WebHelp Classic Search Mechanism

Rules that are applied during a search include:

• Boolean searches are supported using the following operators: and, or, not. When there are two adjacent search terms without an operator, or is used as the default search operator (for example, grow flowers is the same as grow or flowers).
• The space character separates keywords (an expression such as grow flowers counts as two separate keywords: grow and flowers).
• Do not use quotes to perform an exact search for multiple word expressions (an expression such as "grow flowers", returns no results since it searches for two separate words).
• indexterm and keywords DITA elements are an effective way to increase the ranking of a page (for example, content inside keywords elements weighs twice as much as content inside an H1 HTML element).
• Words composed by merging two or more words with colon (":"), minus ("-"), underline ("_"), or dot (".") characters count as a single word.
• Always search for words containing three or more characters (shorter words, such as to or of are ignored). This rule does not apply to CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages.

HTML tag elements are also assigned a scoring value and these values are evaluated for the search results. For information about editing these values, see Editing Scoring Values of Tag Elements in Search Results.

This output format is compatible with the most recent versions of the following common browsers:

• Edge
• Internet Explorer (IE 8 or newer)
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari
• Opera