Flare Tip: Creating breadcrumbs with links

Following is an article I wrote about making your breadcrumbs have links.

Flare provides a feature called breadcrumbs that appear at the top of your topics to show where each topic appears within the table of contents (TOC). For example, in Flare’s online help, there is a topic called Inserting Tables into Topics. Following is what the user sees for the breadcrumbs.

You are here: Features > Tables > Inserting Tables into Topics

The way breadcrumbs work is they reflect the structure of the TOC. In other words, for the previous example, there is a book called Features and inside that book there is a book called Tables. The topic, Inserting Tables into Topics, appears in the Tables book.

Features
      Tables
             Inserting Tables into Topics

The breadcrumbs are effective because they give the user some sense of how the help is organized. William Horton once said that reading a help system was like reading a newspaper through a toilet paper roll—you never really get a sense of the big picture. Breadcrumbs are one way that help authors can give the users a better idea of where they are in the help system.

But wait, there’s more…You can turn your breadcrumbs into links, giving your users another way to navigate your help system. All you have to do is assign a topic to each book and the book names will become links in the breadcrumbs. With topics assigned to the Flare online help TOC books, the users would see:

You are here: Features > Tables > Inserting Tables into Topics

Books in a TOC do not have to have topics associated with them. In essence, they behave like folders, storing other books and pages. But TOC books are a great place to put organizing topics.

Organizing topics typically provide an overview to the other topics in a book. They often include an explanation of the concepts behind the topics and a list of links to other topics with more details. In the example from Flare’s online help, the first topic in the Tables book is a topic called About Tables. This topic is essentially an organizing topic. It doesn’t explain a specific task; rather, it explains what tables are, provides examples of different table elements, and then links to other task-oriented topics that deal with tables.

If we moved this organizing topic to the Tables book (rather than leaving it as the first table under the Tables book), then the Tables part of the breadcrumbs would link to this topic. If users found the topic, Inserting Tables into Topics, but didn’t find the information they needed, they could click on the Tables link, read the organizing topic, and follow links to other topics concerning tables.

Note: Flare allows you to link to one topic multiple times within the TOC. If you do this, the breadcrumbs will only show one path no matter where the topic appears in the TOC. The path will be for last occurrence of the topic closest to the end of your TOC.