Marginal Notes for PDF Export

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Aitch
Posts: 544
Joined: Thu Jun 10, 2004 4:52 pm
Location: Manchester, UK

Marginal Notes for PDF Export

Unread post by Aitch »

Hello all - Long time no see!

New company, new manuals, new head-scratching. I'm converting Doc-2-help and Word documents into H&M.

This time it's for pdf exporting for Marginal Notes on mirrored PDF exports. I've had a quick search and the previous time this was asked was in 2011 and the only option was to add a table for the notes. Unfortunately this will not be feasible. I've attached a small screenshot of what I'm after.
The previous TA added these as text boxes in Word, which works when printing and converting.
Marginal Notes.png
But I want to steer clear of that and do all in H&M.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

Thank you!
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Tim Green
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Re: Marginal Notes for PDF Export

Unread post by Tim Green »

There's a trick you can use to achieve marginal notes using tables. Here is an example of the output, with borders around the table cells so that you can see where they are:
margin_notes01.png

This was a quick and dirty example, so I didn't adjust the positions of the chapter numbers in the headings to match, but you get the general idea. It is possible because Help+Manual allows you to have two sets of style definitions for each style: one for "screen" output (WebHelp, CHM, eWriter) and one for "print" (PDF, DOCX, eBooks).

Step 1: Define a paragraph style with a negative left indent in the Print section, but not in the Screen section:
margin_notes02.png

Step 2: Apply the style to the paragraph that will CONTAIN your marginal comment table

Apply it to the empty paragraph before inserting the table. That is easier.

Step 3: Insert your table for the paragraph with the marginal note

Make sure that Screen view is selected in the status bar at the bottom. This uses the screen version of the style for editing, so that the table is not shifted off the edge of the screen on the left:
margin_notes03.png

Step 4: Select and save a dummy marginal note as a snippet file.

This allows you to insert marginal notes with a couple of clicks using the snippet tool, instead of going through the whole procedure above every time. See here to learn how to do this:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/help/hm_w ... ppets.html

You will also need to edit your PDF template to leave sufficient space on the left for your fake sidebar, of course.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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