RoboHelp 2019 - The Contents Panel

The Contents Panel shows all the topics in the project, rather like Project Manager in older versions.

With a topic open, the panel on the right shows the Properties and allows editing.

• General displays the properties of whatever is selected.
• Styles displays the styles in the selected CSS
• Topic displays the topic properties.

Working in the Contents Panel

This is rather like Project Files in Project Manager as seen in RoboHelp Classic versions but there is a big difference. In Classic versions anything that was in Project Manager went into your output unless excluded by an expression. Now what goes into an output is controlled by the Table of Contents used. How that works is described in The Table of Contents.

What you will see here is an assets folder along with whatever structure you create for topics.

• If you look at the project in File Explorer, you will see the root folder contains the rhpj file that opens the project. This replaces the XPJ file from earlier versions and there is no longer a CPD file.

• Your files are in the Contents folder where you will also find the Assets folder. All the other folders are for internal files.
• You may also see JSON files in your project. These are files used by RoboHelp. Don't touch!

The Assets folder is new. The idea is to keep your images, CSS and suchlike separate from your topics with their own organisational structure.

Right click any folder or file and you will see the various options available, similar to previous versions.

When you upgrade, all the image, media and CSS files will be moved from their existing locations into an Assets folder. The folder structure of your project will be retained for folders containing such files.
For example, if you had all your images in a folder named Images and your media files in a folder named Media, in RoboHelp 2019 you will see Assets > Images and Assets > Media.
After the upgrade, it's up to you where you save the assets but using the Assets folder is recommended.

When you open a topic that is in the Contents Panel, the content appears alongside with its Properties in the Right Panel. See Working on Topics

The Contents Panel Context Menus

In the Contents Panel the context menu changes according to whether you have focus on a folder, a file or a blank area.

Blank Area

Blank Area means anywhere below or to the left of the list of contents.

There's a great new feature here - Import Folder. Click that and you can then browse to any available drive and select a whole folder of, for example, images or you can browse and select multiple images and add them in one go. The same option is in the Folder context menu.
Don't confuse this with Resource Linking, it's an alternative way of adding to the pool of resources without having links.

Folder Menu

Right click on any folder to see this context menu.

Expand will expand the folder with focus and all of its sub-folders.

File Menu

The options will vary according to the file type selected. The menu shown below is for topics.

The context menu has various options including Locate in Topic in a TOC and Show in Explorer to see the topic File Explorer.

If the Locate in TOC option does not show, it is because the topic is not in any TOC. That's a useful way of checking.