Best Practice for different Page layouts for topics in PDF

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markusflow
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Joined: Tue Apr 30, 2019 4:29 pm

Best Practice for different Page layouts for topics in PDF

Unread post by markusflow »

Hi all,

we have a documentation and need some chapters look different in the PDF file (let's say an introduction chapter) than the rest of the topics.
Our solution is to build this chapter as a page layout in the mnl file BEFORE the topics layout. We add the text directly in the mnl or linked it via a project xml that is not part of the Table of Contents.

Is there another way/best practice to do this? With this "workaround", we are limited to add different layouts BEFORE and AFTER the topics only. Snippets loaded in MNL also only fits on one page (no page break), so we need to keep an eye on that and have to split the snippit in to multiple parts.

Any suggestion to solve this issue "better"?
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Tim Green
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Re: Best Practice for different Page layouts for topics in PDF

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Markus,
We have a documentation and need some chapters look different in the PDF file (let's say an introduction chapter) than the rest of the topics.
How do you want it to be different? Depending on what you want to achieve you may be able to change the formatting in the topic itself in your project. Otherwise the only way to have a separate topic like this is really to put it in a separate page in the template, either by entering the text there directly in the template or referencing a topic in your project as a snippet with the Insert > Text Snippet option in Manual Designer. Either way you are limited to a single page, unless you define another page directly after it with additional content or another snippet.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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markusflow
Posts: 50
Joined: Tue Apr 30, 2019 4:29 pm

Re: Best Practice for different Page layouts for topics in PDF

Unread post by markusflow »

Thanks, Tim.
How do you want it to be different? Depending on what you want to achieve you may be able to change the formatting in the topic itself in your project.
Totally different background page color/image.
Otherwise the only way to have a separate topic like this is really to put it in a separate page in the template, either by entering the text there directly in the template or referencing a topic in your project as a snippet with the Insert > Text Snippet option in Manual Designer. Either way you are limited to a single page, unless you define another page directly after it with additional content or another snippet.
Ok. This is how we do it. All good. Thanks.
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