Manual Designer - chapter=book support

[Susan Gallagher]

I want to publish each of the sections of my help project as a separate PDF book, which I can do easily by selecting the topics in the section first. But to completely automate the process, Manual Designer has to allow me to use Heading 1 as the title and Heading 2 in the header. So could you please either add support for more variables on the title page and in the header? Or maybe programmatically bump all the headings up a notch when only selected topics are being published?
Thanks!

[Tim Green]

Hi Susan,

The easiest way to do this is to break up your project into modules, with one module for each section that you are going to produce as a separate PDF as well as a combined document. Then you insert the modules in a Master project from which you produce the combined document. The individual modules can still be opened and published on their own, because they continue to be completely self-contained, independent Help & Manual projects. For details on how to manage this see the section on Modular Projects in the More Advanced Procedures section of the HM help.

But to completely automate the process, Manual Designer has to allow me to use Heading 1 as the title and Heading 2 in the header.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this exactly. Could you explain what you want to achieve here in a little more detail?

[Susan Gallagher]

Not to be contradictory, but modules and masters don't sound particularly easy to me. And I've already re-arranged my project structure once to increase reporting capabilities. It is what it is now.

Manual Designer uses <%TITLE%> on the cover page, which retrieves the project title, and <%HEADING1%> in the header to reference the section of the document you're in.

The EASY way to print just a section would be to create a template that uses <%HEADING1%> on the title page (so the name of the section becomes the name of the book) and <%HEADING2%> in the header to reference the section of the document you're in. But you can't do that now - the title page won't accept head1 and the header won't accept head2. Sounds like an easy fix to me - just add the variables to the acceptable list.

The all-time EASIEST way would be when I select Publish to PDF and check publish selected toc items only, you ask "elevate headings 1 step?" and I check the box and you use the head1 of the section as the title of the book <%TITLE%>=<%HEADING1%> and head2 in the header <%HEADING1%>=<%HEADING2%>

For now, I edit the book title manually and skip the section info in the header.

Thanks!

[Tim Green]

Hi Susan,

I'm afraid that modules is the only solution here. Using any heading variable below level 1 in the page header would be physically impossible without defining a special, complicated, potentially confusing and probably also error-prone "chapter as an individual PDF document" mode. We are not going to do that, because that is precisely what modules are for and it would be a huge amount of work for something that is already possible, diverting valuable programming resources from new and needed functionality. That may sound brutal, but you have to set priorities.

The reason that you can't use lower-level chapter variables in headers and footers is because the matching chapters don't always exist. A top-level chapter is always "there" as a reference -- for example, Chapter 2.1 is a sub-chapter of Chapter 2, so you can still put a Chapter 2 reference in the header. However, when you are in Chapter 2, Chapter 2.1 does not "exist" and a reference to it would be invalid -- you could only put nothing in the header, or an error message. This changes if the chapter is a self-contained module that you can publish on its own, and that is what modules are for.