I’ve been using Flare for a long time, since v1…and for most of that time, I’d never understood what a mini-TOC was and how to use one in online help. Sure, I’d read all the info on them and even read forum posts on them…I didn’t truly understand how to use them and when.

Now I know. (Don’t judge me because I’m slow)

My client likes all the books in the Table of Contents (ostensibly introductory pages) linked to an actual page that lists all the topics in that section. Before the mini-toc, I had to keep track of all the pages in the section, make sure they were in the right order, make sure they read the same, everything. I was constantly pinged by Testing that things weren’t consistent with the TOC.

I found out how wonderfully a mini-toc does this….I don’t have to keep track of new topics, whether they’re noted on the intro page or not. As soon as I create a mini-toc for that section on the intro page, any new topics added to the section be reflected on that page.

To get the mini-TOC to work the way I have it working, you need the following:

• Table of Contents (TOC)  set up or at least started
• Multiple levels (books) in the TOC
• Pages linked to the book page

Here’s an example of what I mean by a multi-level TOC with pages linked to the books.

The box showing a path shows the link to the Admin book. You’ll see that all books and pages have links (identified by the lack of the broken link icon).

The mini-TOC, when used, will show all the pages in a particular book. In the TOC above, when I insert a mini-TOC on the Admin intro page, the four topics in that book will show.

To make this happen, I open the topic to which the book is linked, in this case it’s called Admin Tasks. In the XML Editor, after an introductory sentence or two, I insert the mini-TOC (Insert > Proxy > Insert mini-TOC  Proxy), like this:

If you were to preview this topic, the mini-toc would look like this:

You can change the look of the items via the CSS.

When I build the output, here’s what the page with a mini-toc looks like:

Again, the absolute neatest thing about a mini-toc in online output is that you don’t have to keep making sure that an intro page contains all the topics in that section/book. The mini-toc keeps track of it for you.

I build a lot of PDF documents in Flare and have seen two errors a number of times. The first is this one:

There’s a basic reason for this: you’ve created PDF output in a build and it’s still open in Adobe Reader or Professional. Since Flare has built the output with the file name you assigned (or the default name, either way), it cannot create a second file with the same name. You simply will not be able to build again until you’ve closed the file. As a precaution, I also close Adobe.

The second error I get is related, but a bit more annoying:

I had built to PDF, made some changes in Flare, closed the file and Adobe, and wanted to build again. That’s when the above error popped up. Turns out that while I had saved the topic I was working in, I hadn’t selected Save All. After a lot of testing, and then calling tech support, I realized that clicking Save All in Flare after closing both the PDF file and Adobe will resolve the problem. I have no idea why this works (and neither did MadCap tech support) but it does, so go with it.