Manual designer: creating side-heads

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David Farbey
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Manual designer: creating side-heads

Unread post by David Farbey »

Can anyone tell me if it is possible to create side-heads for a printed manual automatically by defining Help & Manual styles?

Thanks

David
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Greg Smith
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Unread post by Greg Smith »

By a side head do you mean a title to the left (or right) of the text that it titles, outside the column that defines the text with the top of the title level with the paragraph text? If so, the answer is no. I have wanted this for years as I have two major factors that stop me using H&M to generate manuals:

1) lack of side heads
2) lack of text flow around images in PDF output

I still have to use MS Word for printed manuals... excellent though H&M is in many ways, the printed manual appearance is just not good enough for our application. Or put it another way, we are not prepared to drop our house style of many years and move to something that is (in our view) not as good.

Perhaps if enough of us beg, this might be addressed!
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi David, Greg,

Side heads are not available but we are looking into the possibility for future releases, without any firm dates at the moment. The updated Manual Designer coming with version 5.2 sometime in June supports vertical text, which is not quite the same thing, but also quite useful... :)
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David Farbey
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Unread post by David Farbey »

I suppose a work-around would be to export to RTF and then re-format in Word, but Word doesn't really support side-heads either, does it?
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Unread post by mmueller »

Hmmm,

One of our application generates a printout with thousands of pages. To assist the user, we generate side-heads as well.

If application's user manual (which is authored with H&M) would use side-heads too, this would bee great.... I suppose this could be subject for the wish list. ;-)
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Michael Müller
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Unread post by waldemar.hersacher »

Since the original question is answered can someone supply a picture of what a side-head is? Even with Gregs short explanation this term has no meaning for me.
Waldemar
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Alexander Hompe
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Unread post by Alexander Hompe »

Help & Manual 6 Professional Edition
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
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Unread post by David Farbey »

Thanks for the link Alexander.

I suppose there is a strong correlation between "wanting to use side-heads" and "being a current or former FrameMaker user"!!

David
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Greg Smith
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Unread post by Greg Smith »

Here is an example of the type of manual I would like to generate:

http://www.ced.co.uk/pru.shtml?img/Spike7.pdf

This is nothing to do with framemaker... this is all generated by Word using styles.
Last edited by Greg Smith on Wed Feb 02, 2011 1:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Unread post by mmueller »

Alexander,

Thanks for that link. My understanding of a side-head had been something else: A small title outsinde the text column, on the outer side of the page. Usually printed in a colored shape. Depending on the chapter with a special y-position. With such a "side-head" you may find your chapter, even your print-manual is closed).

Greg,

What you like to do can be done with H&M. I do so by using tables. First col is is right aligned and contains headers or icons etc. The second col contains all text etc.
Ok, this is not very handy and any additional comfort would be apreciated ;-)
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Michael Müller
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Greg Smith
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Unread post by Greg Smith »

Tables!

I agree that with infinite patience one could hand-craft a document using tables so that it had a narrow left-hand margin and a wide right column... But this would require keeping two copies of the document, one for help (where I do NOT want the side-by-side headings) and one for the printed manuals (where I do).

So, I would be no better off - in fact a lot worse off as the labour of generating the printed manual would be far worse.

Even if this were practicable, the lack of text flow around images in PDF output rules this out.
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Alexander Hompe
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Unread post by Alexander Hompe »

Michael, I understand what you mean. I would call it a kind of side-register, just printed instead of cutted out.
(Indeed a very nice layout option, but not interesting for me because my printer cannot print marginless)
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the PDF link, that's very helpful for the development team. :) I would agree that this layout is excellent for documentation: It looks nicely "technical" and I find it easier to read than headings with text directly below them.
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Unread post by bennett »

Dear Tim,

If I remember correctly an old version of Doc2Help, has a Word template, containing a layout which produced a sidebar. Heading 1 was the chapter heading, which was a very large font. Heading 2 was a sidebar, and I think underlined. Heading 3 was the same font and size, but aligned with the body text. The left margine was quite large. H4 was slightly smaller, and H5 was italics. You could also specify text that would appear in the left margine in a small font and in italics. This was used to highlight something in the body of the text.

I do remember that it was difficult to use and frequently crashed. As the size of the document grew, so did the problems.

Regards,

Peter
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Just to put some perspective on this discussion:

At the moment Help & Manual has an "automated" PDF generation process, in the sense that the only PDF information you can insert in your actual project consists of hard page breaks and separate styles for PDF. All the other layout elements are predefined for the entire project in the print manual template. Any kind of layout with sideheads or the ability to have headers go across the entire page in column layouts -- which is related, because sideheads are are really a variant on a column layout -- means a significant change to that, because then you need to start making decisions on a paragraph by paragraph basis.

Then you can no longer say, handle all headers like this, all paragraphs like this. It's not possible to simply say that all level X headers are going to be sideheads. That won't work because it will never be appropriate for all headers on that level, you must have a way to define exceptions, and that must be done in the project, not in the template. In addition to this, the sidebar also needs to be able to contain additional objects, like small graphics, complex formatting and so on. You need ways to switch between sidebar mode -- which is essentially a two-column layout without column flow -- and a real column layout with column flow.

This means that to realize a layout like this you need to be able to tag individual objects in your project for specific handling in PDF output. It also means that your PDF layout starts to become radically different from your electronic help layout -- to the extent that the project builds may diverge so much that they are almost different projects. Such a different layout isn't simply a matter of putting the same headers and paragraphs in different locations on the page -- it necessitates divergent content often enough for this to be a serious issue.

This is all technically possible but it would mean a very major rewrite and redesign of the entire template system, from the ground up; although it may look simple at first glance it's not a little formatting feature that you can "just add". Furthermore, it would also introduce a level of complexity into the project, with multiple versions of the same text in very many places, that could easily become counterproductive.

This is not to say that it is not being considered seriously, at least in the medium term. But there are a lot of major issues that need to be solidly and robustly resolved before it can be implemented. If you are just producing a single output format you can generate a PDF like Greg's sidehead example from a Word document without any trouble; if you want to be able to transparently generate multiple builds and output formats from the same project you have to think and plan more broadly, and sometimes you need to leave things out to get a better overall effect.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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