Quick Start Tutorials > Using the Project Explorer

When you load a project into the Project Explorer its contents are displayed in three sections: Table of Contents, Project Files and Configuration. The Table of Contents or "TOC" is a hierarchical tree of entries that define the structure of your project, organizing your topics into chapters and sub-chapters. Most TOC entries have direct links to topic files in the Project Files section. The Project Files section provides access to the actual files that make up your project. The Configuration section stores all the settings associated with your project.

Key Information

Topic entries in the TOC are actually links pointing to matching topic files in the Topic Files section. You can create topic files without TOC entries by creating a new topic file directly in Topic Files instead of in the TOC.

This is the "structure" of your topic. It consists of TOC "entries", most which are linked to topic files in the Project Files section. Other TOC entries are "empty chapters" without any content of their own, others link to web pages or to other Help & Manual projects that you want to merge into the current project.

The TOC section does not actually contain any topic files. It is really just a list of TOC entries with links to the actual topic files, which are stored in the Project Files/Topic Files section of the Project Explorer.

You can create new topic files by adding entries to the TOC. Doing this creates a TOC entry and a topic file, and links the entry to the topic file. You can also create topic files directly in the Topic Files section – then the files do not have TOC entries.

You can change the structure of your TOC by moving the entries around in the TOC tree, either with the mouse or with the blue arrow tools in Project > Manage Topics. Doing this just moves around the entries in the TOC – the topic files and other items to which the TOC entries link remain unchanged.

This section lists all the topic files in your project and "Baggage Files", which are additional files associated with your project.

The Topic Files subsection lists all your topic files, including those that do not have entries in the TOC. For example, these include popup topics and topics that are only displayed when the user clicks on a hyperlink.

The Baggage Files subsection is the place where you store small files that you want to export together with your project when you publish it. These can include graphics you want to use in your own HTML templates, JavaScript files containing functions you want to use in your HTML-based publishing formats and so on. If you are just getting started with Help & Manual you don't need to worry about the baggage files at the moment.

This section contains all your project's configuration settings. This includes your project title, copyright notice, your language settings for help in international languages, special settings and editable layout templates for your output formats, "skins" for changing the appearance and formatting of your entire project, user-defined variables and so on.

Program configuration settings

Note that the Configuration section in the Project Explorer only contains settings for your individual projects (each project has its own configuration settings). The general configuration settings for Help & Manual are accessed in View > Program Options in the Ribbon.

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