Control styles in PDF from top level document

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bradslk
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Control styles in PDF from top level document

Unread post by bradslk »

I'd like to be able to use different fonts for the online help text and the PDF manual generated from Help & Manual. I have a number of help projects and subprojects, which are used to generate the online help. These have styles set for fonts that look good on the screen. such as Arial.

For the manual, I have a project that brings all of these together into a series of chapters. I'd like to be able to use professional printers' fonts for the PDF file. I'd thought that the top level project's styles would override the lower level projects, but this doesn't seem to happen.

Thanks,
Lee.
Lee Bradshaw
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Lee,

This feature is already included! Each style has three sets of definitions, for the editor (Editor View tab), electronic help (Help File View tab) and printed help (Print Manual View tab). To use different fonts in PDF and printed manuals you just need to change the style definitions in the Print Manual View tab in Format - Edit Styles. This is very quick -- if you change the font of the Normal style it will automatically change all styles in the style tree except those that are not based on Normal.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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bradslk
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Unread post by bradslk »

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the quick reply. It's close to what I want; but I need to go and change the styles in eight different projects to make a single change to the layout of the manual - unless I'm still missing something.

I'd like to be able to control the styles for the manual from a single place. More important in the early stages, when someone decides that the heading font style needs to change at least twice a week.

Lee.
Lee Bradshaw
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Lee,
It's close to what I want; but I need to go and change the styles in eight different projects to make a single change to the layout of the manual
No, you don't need to do this at all. The master project is definitive; any style definitions (and most other things too) in the master have priority and will propagate through all the children automatically, provided the styles there have the same names. Only manually-applied fonts and unique styles with their own names in the child modules need to be changed locally.

The only fonts you need to define in the template are those for the elements that are generated directly by the template, i.e. the print-style TOC and the headings for individual chapters in the Topics section.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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bradslk
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Unread post by bradslk »

Hi Tim,
The only fonts you need to define in the template are those for the elements that are generated directly by the template, i.e. the print-style TOC and the headings for individual chapters in the Topics section.
This turns out to be my problem. The normal style is propagating to the child documents just fine, and I was expecting the heading styles to do the same: as you say, they don't.

This means that if I want to change the base font, I have to change just about everything in the design document. I've just done this once, and it takes about an hour. I'd like to change the page numbers so they're not bold, but at the moment it just looks too tedious to go through a succession of dialog boxes twenty times.

There should be more inheritance here: I should be able to define styles in the master document that dictate the fonts and sizes used in the PDF headings, index, title pages, and so forth, all based on Normal.

It would also be nice to be able to use expanded text in the headings in the PDF.

Thanks,
Lee.
Lee Bradshaw
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Lee,
This means that if I want to change the base font, I have to change just about everything in the design document. I've just done this once, and it takes about an hour. I'd like to change the page numbers so they're not bold, but at the moment it just looks too tedious to go through a succession of dialog boxes twenty times.
Yes, but once you've set the font for your template you've set it -- since it's only for one output format you won't want to change it and if you do you can easily create multiple templates and choose them as you please. But you definitely don't want inheritance from the project into the template. It may sound like a good idea at first glance but it would defeat the purpose of the template system, which is to give you full control over the layout and appearance of your PDF documents and printed manuals, and to be able to switch templates to change your appearance and "branding" in seconds.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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bradslk
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Unread post by bradslk »

Hi Tim,

Well, if I don't want inheritance from the project into the template, then I want styles in the template that override those in the project. It's nice to think that we would produce all our manuals using the same style from one release to the next; but the manual is one of the few parts of our products that Marketing think they understand: and once they get involved, nothing stays the same from one release to the next.

Besides, it's a rule of life: never set text attributes directly; always use a style. I can't do that in the template at the moment because it doesn't support them.

Lee.
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Lee,
bradslk wrote:Besides, it's a rule of life: never set text attributes directly; always use a style. I can't do that in the template at the moment because it doesn't support them.
I'd have to agree with you there. I'm afraid I don't know at the moment whether EC has plans to introduce styles in the Print Manual Designer, but it would be a logical step to take. :)
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Laini Giles
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Re: Control styles in PDF from top level document

Unread post by Laini Giles »

Hi gents--

Just wondering if there has been any change to this in the few years since this topic was posted.

Laini
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Tim Green
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Re: Control styles in PDF from top level document

Unread post by Tim Green »

Print Manual Designer does not currently support styles, sorry. However, if you insert a topic in a template page as a snippet from your project using the Text Snippet option in the Insert menu, it will use the styles from the project. Requirement: The topic must fit on a single template page.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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