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 the sequence to which the topic belongs. The sequence number specifies the location in the sequence where the topic is displayed.
If your Help file has only one browse sequence, you don’t need to assign a sequence name to browse sequence footnotes. You simply specify the sequence number in each footnote. Windows Help 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 Windows Help compiler ignores skipped numbers; only their order is significant. (See the “Sorting Order” section, later in this chapter.)
You aren’t required to use sequence numbers in footnotes. If you don’t, Windows Help displays topics in their order of appearance in the topic file.
To set up more than one browse sequence in a Help file, 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 command topics within the FILENAME.RTF file, and the procedure topics within the FILENAME.RTF file, are arranged in a browse sequence:
| FILENAME.RTF | FILENAME.RTF |
| cmd:0005
cmd:0010 cmd:0015 cmd:0020 cmd:0025 . |
how:0005
how:0010 how:0015 how:0020 how:0025 . |
This creates two different browse sequences: one for PLACEHOLDER and one for PLACEHOLDER.
If you don’t want to keep track of sequence numbers for each sequence and you want to display topics in their order of appearance, use a constant value for the browse-sequence number in each footnote. For example, to display the topics in the PLACEHOLDER and PLACEHOLDER sequences in their order of appearance within the file, assign the sequence names and a constant number as follows:
| FILENAME.RTF | FILENAME.RTF |
| cmd:0000
cmd:0000 cmd:0000 cmd:0000 cmd:0000 . |
how:0000
how:0000 how:0000 how:0000 how:0000 . |
This still creates the two browse sequences, but the topics in each sequence are displayed in their 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 number in a sequence (don’t use a two-character number for one topic and a three-character number for another). Otherwise, in certain cases, a higher sequence number could appear before a lower one.
For example, even though the number 100 is numerically higher than 99, the topic with sequence number 100 will appear before topic 99 because Windows Help 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).