Include content from wiki in pdf output

[John Johann]

The info on embedding html objects in the online help seems to rule it out, but I'll ask anyway as I can't test at the moment.

How can I include contents from an intranet wiki page when publishing to pdf?
Formatting is a secondary issue, I'd just like to be able to include certain info automatically on publishing.

[Tim Green]

Hi John,

The #MERGE command only inserts HTML directly into the page without any conversion, and it is only exported to HTML formats. That rules out PDF and Word, since they are not HTML.

[John Johann]

Hi Tim,
Thanks -- any workarounds?

[Tim Green]

Thanks -- any workarounds?

Not if you want the content to be merged on publishing. You can import HTML pages into your topics directly, of course, but that then becomes part of the topic page and doesn't update after that. I would suggest just including a hyperlink to the URL of the wiki page.

PS: I'm still not sure whether your first name is John or Johann -- the name works both ways round in English, just like Henry James...

[Mike Linacre]

Would this work?
wiki HTML webpage -> Microsoft Word -> Save As .rtf -> import into H&M as a New Topic
All this controlled by a Windows keyboard macro, run 100 times for 100 Wiki pages. Then
-> Publish H&M project to any format

[Tim Green]

Would this work?
wiki HTML webpage -> Microsoft Word -> Save As .rtf -> import into H&M as a New Topic

That's fine, since you're importing it before publishing and then it becomes static content.

One important warning about importing Word content: If the generated RTF uses inline formatting the resulting XML formatting code can take up over 90% of the body of the topic in the source code (this also happens with any Word file that uses manual formatting instead of styles). You can check this by looking in the XML editor after importing the topic. When it exports to WebHelp you then get the equivalent in inline CSS formatting, and very bloated HTML files. If this happens it's generally better to reset the entire page (select all, right click, "Convert to Plain Text") and then format with styles.