Hi Mike,

Those look like good ideas for things known/thought to be of interest, especially for the future. I'll definitely give them a whirl.

I remember some things in older styled Help that I liked, like "expand topic" and annotate, but those seem to have gone the way of the dodo-bird.

I suspect that links are a real big convenience for authors, and if they're not then I hope soon that they come to realize that we are BOTH losers (authors and readers) with the current practise and trend.

Thanks



>>>Anyway, I have long suffered, when using Help files, the problem of "getting lost" when I link-to-link-to-link-to... My problem is that it is very infrequently that I end up back where I started all of the cascading clicks. The result is that I SKIP stuff that I should read.
>>>
>>>Help is in a browser. Have you tried using ALT+LeftArrow or the Back button to go Back? If that doesn't do it for you, then I agree it's hard to systematically read everything unless you go through the index.
>>
>>Yes, I have a mouse (couldn't live without it) that has scroll wheel AND Back/Forward buttons defined.
>>
>>I think you're right about systematically just going through the index. But even here, lots of pages are nothin-but-links.
>>It seems that the authors generally have made too much use of this "feature", to the point that for me it is a negative feature.
>>
>>Oh well, I'll continue trundling along as I have been. I just hate the idea of PROBABLY always missing something.
>>
>>cheers
>
>Hi Jim,
>
>I'm confused as to whether the help is in an HTML Help file or a bunch of loose web pages. With HTML Help, I make liberal use of the Favorites tab. Note that you can revise the default topic headings for this purpose. More generally, whatever form the help takes, whether it's in HTML Help, local web pages, or real web addresses, what I do is to create a subtree of categorized links, which I maintain via Windows Explorer. Since it's just links, this reference tree never gets to be terribly large. Then I freely copy links into the appropriate categorized subdirectories by dragging and dropping them in Windows Explorer. You become pretty familiar with the right-click-and-drag context menu in this mode of usage.
>
>Mike