I am currently evaluating HelpStudio and have come across a question that I can't find an answer to anywhere.

I am creating browser-based help and want to be able to trigger the help from my application to a specific topic, but I want the TOC to be visible in the left frame. How do I do this? If I link to the html in question I just get that topic without the frames. I'm sure it must be possible. I hope you understand my question.

You can pass the required inital topic name to the root page (webframe.html), e.g.

http://www.myweb.com/webframe.html?topic1.html

That will show the TOC on the left, content on the right - with the default page of topic1.html

I thought there should be an easy solution, but that doesn't seem to work. When I enter that address I get an IE error message that the address doesn't exist. "Check the spelling and try again." I've checked the spelling and tried changing the name of the html so that it is shorter, but no luck. Any ideas?

An idea here is that the address should be something like http://www.myweb.com/webframe.html?topic=mytopic.html. Could that be possible?

The URL I gave you was just an example - your own help will obviously be published somewhere else - it's the webframe.html?mytopic.html (where mytopic is the name of the topic you want to show in the content area) that is the important bit. Let me know if you have any problems.

I understood that, but C:\Users\hoppo.EP\Documents\HelpTest\WebHelp\webframe.html?Logging_On_.html results in an IE error message that says the address cannot be found, check for spelling errors. Does it only work after files have been deployed and have received an http:// address?

In IE you can do this for local files, but you need to prefix with file://, e.g.

file://C:\Users\hoppo.EP\Documents\HelpTest\WebHelp\webframe.html?Logging_On_.html

Well, that just made my day...thank you!