Beware the Delete key.  Use with caution.  When keyboard focus is on the Keywords window of Dr.Explain, there is no delete confirmation.  In some contexts this is a good thing, so I am not knocking it, but I am saying:

 

If you leave keyboard focus on the keywords display, and then switch keyboard focus to other applications, and there are any applications that can potentially pop up windows or do other things to affect where keyboard focus is, be sure to LOOK at where your keyboard focus is before hitting the Delete key.

 

If you do hit the Delete key and the keywords display received that keystroke and you weren't looking, whatever keyword was highlighted is going to silently disappear along with its child keywords!  What's worse is if your index is long (and it should be) it will not be easy to determine which keyword (and its children) is no longer there!

 

If this happens there are two options:

 

1.     The first and easiest option is to UNDO by hitting Ctrl-Z on the keyboard, or Edit > Undo on the menu.  Thankfully, the Dr.Explain team including UNDO for the keywords list.  If there is an incident such as the above, this will save a lot of work from being lost!

 

2.     The second option is to select File > Save As... from the menu and save your help project as another file name temporarily, then close it.  Then re-open the original file to get your keyword (and children) back.  If needed, you can open both the original and the new one and copy/paste from one to the other.  This is VERY powerful in the Keywords list because it brings the links with it!

 

Sound advice:

 

a. Save often.

 

b. LOOK where the keyboard focus is before hitting the Delete key.

 

c. If you are done with the Keywords list for a while, switch keyboard focus back to some other part of the application. This way if you accidentally hit the Delete key, it is much easier to recover whatever got deleted, if anything.

 

 

 

If you click an index entry to select it and find that you are now (unintentionally) editing the index name, DO NOT click another index entry to escape this situation.  Instead, hit the Esc key.  Attempting to click on another index entry results in an unpredictable jump of the Keywords display, and your mouse click goes somewhere that usually wasn't intended (e.g. checking or unchecking a checkbox next to a keyword, where this would create an erroneous link [or a missing link] in your index).  (I reported this as a bug, so I would expect this to be fixed in upcoming releases.)

 

 

 

Having a "see instead" entry without any subentries does not work because the Windows HTML Help engine displays this message:

 

"To locate information about this keyword,

please select one of the subentries in the list."

 

but there aren't any subentries.

 

Example (error):

 

information tabs, see User Interface, information tabs

 

with no link to any pages.

 

This DOES however work if there are subentries, but in this case there were not.  So I added a link from that entry to the same links provided by the [User Interface > information tabs] keyword and it worked nicely after that.