Basic Working Procedures > Creating Topic Files > Editing the topic caption and header

The topic caption is the title of the topic displayed in the TOC, both in Help & Manual and in your output. For example, captions are displayed as the TOC titles in the Contents pane of the HTML Help viewer and the Winhelp viewer and the Contents page of a PDF file.

When you create a new topic the caption text is duplicated in the topic header, which is the title displayed in the editing box above the topic itself. The header is also displayed in your output, for example above the topics in the HTML Help and Winhelp viewers.

1.	Click on the topic in the TOC.

2.	Press F2 or wait a second or two and click again ("slow" double-click) or click on the Edit Caption button in Project > Manage Topics.

3.	Edit the caption and then press Enter to finish

When you create a new topic its caption is automatically duplicated in the topic header. If you only edit the caption the header is also updated automatically so that the caption and the header remain identical. However, if you want you can also make the topic header different – for example so that you have a short caption for the TOC and a longer, more descriptive header.

•	Click in the header box above the Page Editor end edit the header text. When you do this the header and the caption are no longer linked and can then both be edited separately.

•	To "re-link" the caption and the header again just make the text in both identical again. Then the header will automatically be updated when you edit the caption in the TOC.

To turn off the header for a topic just deselect the Topic has a separate header checkbox below the topic editor on the left. This will create a topic without a header in your published output.

Warning: Turning off the header deletes any additional content you have added to the header box. If you turn the header on again the box will only contain the standard topic title, taken from the topic's TOC entry. The content will not be lost while you are still editing the current topic (you can restore it by reactivating the checkbox) but once you leave the current topic it will be deleted permanently.