About Navigation Links

A navigation link is a feature that points to additional information from a specific area in a topic or document.

  • Cross-Reference You can automatically add page references in printed manuals and hyperlinks in online outputs. The page numbers will not appear in online output. See Inserting Cross-References.
  • Expanded, Drop-Down, or Popup Text You can use three different methods to display information that is initially not displayed in your output: Expanded Text, Drop-Down Text, or Popup Text. See Creating Expanded, Drop-Down, or Popup Text.
  • Expanding/Collapsing Section For online output, you can create sections of content that are expanded or collapsed by default.  This is an ideal way to subdivide a long topic in online documentation. See Creating Expanding/Collapsing Sections.
  • Group Groups can also be referred to as "related topics" or "associative topics" (A-links). When a group of topics is related, a link can be created in your online output that displays a dialog or popup window displaying the list of topics in that group. See About Groups.
  • Link You can create links to topics, bookmarks, link tags, keywords, groups, and glossary entries. You can also use drag-and-drop linking to quickly add links from the Word Doc-To-Help Project panel or from a variety of locations in Doc-To-Help. See Creating Links and Drag-and-Drop Linking.
  • Link Tag A link tag is a unique identifier for a topic, and makes it possible to create a jump or popup link to a topic. See Adding Link Tags.
  • Related Topics Related topics (also known as "subtopic links") can be created/edited and viewed using the Related Topics pane and the Topics window. The related topics feature is very powerful, because it lets you customize relevant "See Also" links for any topic, without the need to create individual cross-reference links. Combined with the automatically created subtopic relations, this means your online outputs can help your users find the exact topic they need, when they need it. It can also eliminate topic "dead ends" in your online output. See Managing Related Topics.

Note Other features in Doc-To-Help are also used to add navigation in online output. These features are treated separately in this Help system. They include tables of contents and indexes. See Creating a Table of Contents and About Indexes.