RoboHelp 8 - Twisties

About Twisties

Twisties have been available on my site for a long time and it is good that Adobe have introduced this feature into RoboHelp in Version 8.

They are defined as part of the style and you can set RoboHelp up to have twisties applied to dropdowns and / or expanding text and /or glossary terms. Each type of hotspot can use different images.

The twisty will be displayed with all dropdown hotspots and / or all expanding text hotspots and / or all glossary terms using the cascading style sheet. You cannot apply the twisty to just some hotspots and you cannot apply different style classes to get around this. If the stylesheet defines twisties for a type of hotspot, all hotspots of the same type in topics using the same style sheet will have the twisty.

In this release of RoboHelp there is no option to expand all twisties.

Setting Up Twisties

Right click the type of hotspot and select Edit.

Click the highlighted button to access a dialog that allows you to select the required images (the button image represents a twisty).

Any dropdown hotspot using the same style sheet will now display twisties in the Preview window or the generated help. The twisty will not appear in the RoboHelp Design Editor nor will it appear in printed documentation. You may take the view that the twisty would not work in a printed document (true) but you might also want the printed document to show your help as it appears online.

Repeat the steps for expanding text hotspots and glossary terms if required.

Example

The cascading style sheet used for this topic has twisties defined for dropdowns but not for expanding text.

Dropdown hotspotDropdown hotspot

This is an example of expanding textexpanding text[Expanding text is used to add some additional information. It is good practice to enclose it in brackets.].

Summary

This is a welcome new feature that will suit many authors. It lacks the ability to exclude specific hotspots and to show / hide the content of all hotspots. If those features are important to you, the methods described on my site still work in RoboHelp. The downside of "my" twisties is they have to be set up for each hotspot.