Is there some place where Toad Help is available in a document or web page form? As far as I know, the only documents that exist outside of Help are release notes, an installation guide, and a getting started.
I really like the fact that an F1 Help feature exists because the places we use Toad the most are blocked from Internet access. Apps that we have that have purely online documentation, such as Oracle stuffs, cannot be accessed in those environments. But, it would also be helpful if Toad offered the Help information in other forms as well.
Cheers,
Russ
The help content is only available in the Toad.chm file.
Thanks, Michael. That being the case, it would be helpful if there was a single top-level topic folder in which all help is rolled up to facilitate using the help utility's built-in capability for printing to other document types, such as PDF. As it stands, there are over 20 high-level topics each of which has to be converted to a separate PDF.
I do not wish to encroach on Quest IP, but since the MS tool allows printing by high-level topic, it would be helpful if a single high-level topic contained everything so that other document formats could be created.
Cheers,
Russ
We currently use MadCap Flare which does support PDF. All of Toad for Oracle's documentation is produced using Flare. Using publish targets we can produce documentation in different formats. However, there are conditional directives that determine which content is produced for each target. The Help project is very large. I imagine there's a small chance the PDF output would be a direct comparison to the CHM, but I can certainly run a test today and see what happens.
On a related note, all documentation, except Toad.chm, will be available online only in 2025 R2 which should be generally available within the week.
Help as PDF was never intended and there was no PDF target defined in our project for it. I've added a PDF target and built and it's... rough. The project is responsible for producing both Toad.chm and the Getting Started Guide PDF. When I create a new PDF target for Help contents, it lumps in all of the topics from both sub projects into a 1280 page document.
The table of contents has a bunch of top-level nodes that should be nested beneath other topics. For example, this screenshot shows how to view cursor data in a grid, but it is presented as a top-level topic.
In Toad.chm, the topic is properly nested beneath the main topic for working with data.
There are hundreds of other similar out of place elements.
This would be an epic chore to sort out. What is the advantage to having the Help as a PDF vs. the CHM? PDF allows for text searches whereas the CHM uses tags and other features for search. Provided the tags are set well, the CHM search performs better. The PDF search is yielding hundreds of matches to some words and going through the results is tedious.
Well, bummer. It would help me to be able to read the documentation as a book, but the MS Help facility is not very suitable for that approach. It also does not provide a means of making "personal markups" as do PDF and other formats. From a usability standpoint, MS Help is just about the worst UI around so that many products have abandoned it.
Cheers,
Russ
