Videos & PDF's

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Ron Horn
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Videos & PDF's

Unread post by Ron Horn »

For Webhelp this obviously works nicely. But when I produce the PDF, it just shows the poster image. No real surprise, I didn't expect it to play IN the document. But am I missing a setting somewhere to hide this poster image or allow it to be clickable? Being not clickable serves no purpose in the PDF and just confuses things.
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Tim Green
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Re: Videos & PDF's

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Ron,

If you want to exclude it use conditional text tags to do so. Just select the video placeholder in the editor, then select the conditional text tool in Write > Insert Object ([IF> icon) and select IFNOT ... PDF if PDF is the only format you want to exclude it from. Depending on how much whitespace you may want to leave, or not, you may want to adjust the positions of the IF and END tags.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Ron Horn
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Re: Videos & PDF's

Unread post by Ron Horn »

A slap on the hand and the URL below would have been appropriate too, so thanks for understanding as I onboard myself with H&M :D

https://www.helpandmanual.com/help/hm_a ... tions.html
Ron Horn
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Re: Videos & PDF's

Unread post by Ron Horn »

I see in creating a PDF outside H&M I can add an image and overlay a Link object that I've sized to the image. Then clicking the image will launch the specified URL. Is this technically feasible enough to justify a feature request? Maybe there are unpredictable variables that make this not feasible.

But, if feasible, media objects in H&M's PDF output could link to web pages.
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Tim Green
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Re: Videos & PDF's

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Ron,

That's an interesting idea: Have an option for turning the image into a link to an external URL when the media object is published in PDF, DOCX, ePub or Kindle. I'll definitely pass that on to our dev team. 8)
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Alexander Halser
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Re: Videos & PDF's

Unread post by Alexander Halser »

Hi Ron,
For Xplains this is already available in Help+Manual 8. Web videos (Youtube, Vimeo) have been doing this automatically in version 7 already.
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Alexander Halser
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Ron Horn
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Re: Videos & PDF's

Unread post by Ron Horn »

We don't have Xplains at the moment, but thanks for that tip.
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Sheri Steeves
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Re: Videos & PDF's

Unread post by Sheri Steeves »

I found this thread looking for a way to have my YouTube videos output into my PDF files as an image with a hyperlink to the video. This thread suggests that H&M 7 already does this, but when I insert the video and create my PDF, only an image (the selected poster image) of the video is created - there is no associated URL action.

We have H&M 7 and 8 - do either of these versions do this automatically? I can #ifdef PDF with my own image/link placeholder but this seems like something that should automatically happen. Am I missing a setting or and option?
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Tim Green
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Re: Videos & PDFs

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Sheri,

Help+Manual doesn't currently turn YouTube videos into an automatic WebLink to the video in PDF. That would be a nice feature though. 8) At the moment you need to create an image link with a screenshot of the video for use in the PDF version (you can select an image instead of a text caption in the regular Insert Link dialog) and link it to the video on YouTube. Then use conditional text to include the link version for PDF and the embedded version for formats that support it (CHM, WebHelp, eWriter).
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Sheri Steeves
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Re: Videos & PDF's

Unread post by Sheri Steeves »

Thanks for confirming I wasn't missing a setting or something simple. The tip about the image in the link caption is a good one. Add in my vote for adding this as a feature as it generates a bit of work for plus extra IFDEFs on the page to maintain.
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