You define browse sequences for your topics by assigning a plus sign (+) footnote to the topics in each browse sequence. A browse sequence footnote has a sequence name, followed by a colon, followed by a sequence number. A sequence name identifies which sequence the topic belongs to. The sequence number specifies the location in the sequence where the topic is displayed.
If your title has only one browse sequence, you don't need to assign a sequence name to browse sequence footnotes. You can simply specify the sequence number in each footnote. Viewer then displays the topics in the order of these sequence numbers.
You might want to skip one or more numbers in a sequence so you can add
new topics later. For example, use increments of five or ten. The Viewer
compiler ignores skipped numbers; only their order is significant.
You aren't required to use sequence numbers in footnotes. If you don't, Viewer simply displays topics in their order of appearance in the topic file.
To set up more than one browse sequence in a title, use different sequence names to identify the different browse sequences. In the browse sequence footnote for each topic, assign a sequence name and a sequence number separated by a colon, as shown below:
sequence-name:sequence-number
For example, here's how the topics for the state of Arizona within the STATES_A.RTF file, and the topics for the state of Texas within the STATES_T.RTF file, are arranged in a browse sequence:
STATES_A.RTF STATES_T.RTF
az:005 tx:005
az:010 tx:010
az:015 tx:015
az:020 tx:020
az:060 tx:060
. .
. .
. .This creates two different browse sequences: one for Arizona and one for Texas.
You might decide that you don't want to keep track of sequence numbers for each sequence and just want to display topics in their order of appearance. To do this, simply use a constant value for the browse-sequence number in each footnote. For example, to display the topics in the Arizona and Texas sequences in their order of appearance within the file, assign the sequence names and a constant number as follows:
STATES_A.RTF STATES_T.RTF
az:000 tx:000
az:000 tx:000
az:000 tx:000
az:000 tx:000
az:000 tx:000
. .
. .
. . This still creates the two browse sequences, but the topics in each sequence will be displayed in order of appearance in the topic file.
Sequence numbers can include both numbers and alphabetic characters. During the compiling process, they're sorted using an alphabetic sort, not a numeric sort. Always use the same number of characters for each sequence number in a sequence—otherwise, in certain cases, a higher sequence number could appear before a lower one. This means you shouldn't use a two-character number for one topic, and a three-character number for another.
For example, even though the number 100 is numerically higher than 99, the topic with sequence number 100 will appear before topic 99 because Viewer is comparing a string beginning with “1” to a string beginning with “9”. To keep the topics in their correct numeric order, you must make 99 a three-digit string (099).