Print single topic as PDF

Nothing is perfect! This is where you can post your ideas and wishes for functions you'd like to see in Help & Manual. Current version only please (H&M7).

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Tim Frost
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Print single topic as PDF

Unread post by Tim Frost »

I understand the dialog that discourages printing to a PDF print driver, and indeed what I want to create (for occasional review) is how the single topic will appear on a PDF page, when formatted with our standard PDF manual settings. So I check the 'selected topics only', and publish to PDF. What I get is an 11-page PDF with title, contents, blank pages, index, etc. I then have to load this in a PDF editor and delete eight of the pages to get the three I need.

Would it be possible to have another checkbox alongside the 'selected topics' one, for publishing to PDF, which says 'suppress everything except the topic pages'?
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Tim Green
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Re: Print single topic as PDF

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Tim,
Would it be possible to have another checkbox alongside the 'selected topics' one, for publishing to PDF, which says 'suppress everything except the topic pages'?
You can actually achieve this quite easily: Make a copy of your .mnl PDF template (you could call it "topics_only.mnl" or something like that). Then open it in the Print Manual Designer and turn off all the sections EXCEPT the Topics section. You do this by selecting the section, opening the Page Options dialog in the Pages menu (or by double-clicking on an empty are in the page) and disabling the Print Section option.

Then any project you publish to PDF with that template will only have topics and no other components. If you do this frequently you could set up a publishing task for it in the publishing tasks manager. See this chapter in the help for details on this.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Tim Frost
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Re: Print single topic as PDF

Unread post by Tim Frost »

I did consider that idea. But it is less convenient than a checkbox, and another file to remember to update if the PDF manual design changes. It will do for now but I still think a checkbox would be worth considering, or even changing the default as well. When quickly publishing a few topics to PDF my guess is that most people do not need to see their contents, index and title.
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Greg Smith
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Re: Print single topic as PDF

Unread post by Greg Smith »

What I often need is really a Print Preview of the topic as it would appear in PDF format. This does not help with page breaks, but it would still be helpful.
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Tim Green
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Re: Print single topic as PDF

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Greg,

You can achieve a pretty good approximation of this much more quickly than with even a single-topic PDF output by using the Print Preview function in File > Print Manual. You can set this to use the same template as PDF output (Print Manual works via a temporary PDF) and the preview is on-screen and quite fast. It will not give you accurate pagination, but it will be WYSIPC (What You See Is Pretty Close). 8)
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Greg Smith
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Re: Print single topic as PDF

Unread post by Greg Smith »

Well yes... but it takes ages... 4 mouse clicks to get the the preview, then a very fast display of page 1 (good), but my manual has 828 pages...

H&M for the Help side is excellent. The Manual side is getting better, but it is hard work.

How about a Print Preview in the topic using the set manual and printing the current topic only and starting at the top of the page (as that is all we can realistically hope for) unless you are prepared to speculatively paginate the document on a separate thread up to the current topic in the current top level menu (which would be perfect). Now that I suggestthis, that would not be too bad even if it had to do that when you asked for the preview... we do not care what the page number is, just that the arrangement is right. And waiting for pagination from the last top level would not be too bad (in most cases), through I have a manual section (an alphabetical list of routines) that is more than 200 pages.

At the moment I have to keep generating PDFs of my output, then open them in Adobe Reader to see what I used to have... What we want is another H&M window showing our current topic as it would appear printed (and why not one for each output format), all showing how the current topic really looks (without all the IF...ELSE...ENDIF)...

Get this to work and your product will not only be world-beating, it will have Galactic significance.
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Martin Wynne
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Re: Print single topic as PDF

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

Greg Smith wrote:Well yes... but it takes ages... 4 mouse clicks to get the the preview, then a very fast display of page 1 (good), but my manual has 828 pages...
Hi Greg,

There is an option on the Print Preview page to "Print selected TOC items only". On my system any topic is equally fast. I have set a keyboard shortcut on Print Manual to save a few clicks (I use Numpad-Subtract).

Another option is Print Current Topic (Shift+Ctrl+P). If you make the Snagit printer capture as your default printer, you get an instant preview, and can compare it with previous captures.

regards,

Martin.
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Greg Smith
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Re: Print single topic as PDF

Unread post by Greg Smith »

Thanks Martin. The Print Selected topic as preview would be further improved if:
1) The output window remembered where it was positioned
2) If you activate it a second time it replaced the first activation
Tim Frost
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Re: Print single topic as PDF

Unread post by Tim Frost »

The 'Print Preview - Current Topic' is indeed a curious beast. It manages to omit the index from the preview, so reduces the unnecessary page count by a couple of pages, but it still includes title pages and contents. And it insists on my selecting an entry from the (red) central panel, which it takes no notice of - the preview is always a print preview. While nothing is checked and the panel remains red, the message below the disabled preview button reads, "There is no export Please select at least".

Finally, when the preview is displayed, the up/down arrow next to the page number changes the page number and beeps, but does not display the numbered page. And overall, only marginally faster than publishing to a PDF, from which I can also print the pages I need.
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Tim Green
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Re: Print single topic as PDF

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Tim,

The preview is also generated using an PDF template so if you are previewing the whole project the sections it contains depend entirely on your template. If you only want to preview topics you need to create a template that only contains the Topics section. If you want to preview just selected topics or chapters you must select them in the TOC before selecting the Print options, then you will see the "Print selected TOC items only" option.
Finally, when the preview is displayed, the up/down arrow next to the page number changes the page number and beeps, but does not display the numbered page.
That control selects the page you want to jump to, which you can also enter manually by clicking in the field and typing a number. You then jump to that page by pressing ENTER. It's the blue navigation buttongs to the right and left of the page number selector that take you directly to the next or previous pages. And the blue beginning/end buttons beyond those take you to the beginning and end of the preview.

Pagination in the preview should not be taken too seriously. It will often be slightly different from the actual PDF or printed output.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Greg Smith
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Re: Print single topic as PDF

Unread post by Greg Smith »

Yes; the pagination is not exactly the same in Preview... which is a pain as that is what we use it for!

When I am adjusting the text so that the manual looks decent it is a real pain that the preview does not replace the previous one, in the same screen position.
Laini Giles
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Re: Print single topic as PDF

Unread post by Laini Giles »

I'd be another person who REALLY wants to see a single topic, both as a printed version and in PDF.

The number of clicks required for this is REALLY a pain. If I remember (it's been a few years since I had to use it), RoboHelp had a button at the top to "Print Selected Topic." I could take the topic I was on and just do a print of it.

I'm new in my current position. There is a lot of back and forth with my manager as I learn how the system works. I've now started actually writing topics, and I function best with content I've already written, marking up topics with his comments as we go through.

These topics were already named before I got here (and using really acronym-like naming conventions. Having to decide which of these I want to print from a TOC is not easy.

I'm begging for this functionality. Please let us print a single topic or print it to PDF so we can see how it looks when it's printed.
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Tim Green
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Re: Print single topic as PDF

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Laini,

Noted, thanks for the feedback! :)
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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