Cleaner way to start a topic on a new page (PDF)

[Andre.Greeff]

I constantly find myself inserting page breaks in the document in order to fix printed manual layouts.. Recently I started to wonder how many other people end up doing the same thing, and I started to consider better ways to handle that.

Thanks to old habits I tend keep the Topic Options panel open permanently, which got me thinking.. How about adding a simple "Start topic on new page" tickbox, which would (for applicable formats) ensure that the topic starts on it's own page when published? Any chance of getting something like this in the 6.x version range?

[Tim Green]

Hi Andre,

Please see the page break options in the Topics section in Manual Designer: Select the Topics section, then open the Page Options dialog in the Pages menu. At the bottom of the dialog you will find a table where you can set the automatic page break options for each topic level. You can set topics to start on any new page, always on an odd new page, or without a new page. That should cover 90% of your needs. For the rest you can enter manual page breaks.

[Andre.Greeff]

I am aware of the page breaks based on topic levels, however that applies the same "to break, or not to break" setting to each matching item, as opposed to only the topics where the user manual designer feels need breaks..

For example, I'm currently documenting a section where there are 5 primary wizards with different steps to cover: two of them are quite long and cover multiple pages, while the other three are half to two-thirds of a page each. In order to get a "clean" printed layout, I have to add page breaks to some of the pages, but not to others. Instead of using page breaks for this, I would love to be able to check a tick box while editing a topic to enable a "this topic must always start on it's own page" type of option.

This really is a trivial request, it's not going to make people jump up and down for joy, but it's just a little UI finishing touch that I think would be very handy.

[Tim Green]

Hi Andre,

Sorry, we discussed this today and we decided that the disadvantages outweigh the benefits here. Inserting a manual page break is really not so onerous, but adding too many options to the dialogs is.

[Andre.Greeff]

Fair enough.. Thanks for the update.

[Kevin Killion]

I agree that setting page breaks according to level in an outline hierarchy isn't suitable. I want page breaks before most topics. But in some areas I have a series of very short topics, and when PDF'ed we don't need a page for each.

That suggests that what's desirable is an option, "Do NOT insert page break" on specific topics, that is, a manual "no break".