Chapter numbering and chapter front pages in PDF

[_Nicholas]

Hi,
I use H+M to generate PDF documents.
At the moment I use the top level topic as the chapter front page, I don't use the "Top level Intro" from the template.

If I try to use the "Top level Intro" in the template I end up with 2 chapter start pages because the top level topic is also included.
Unfortunately this means I have to add the chapter title manually in the text, and this is obviously not very flexible.

Is there any way to solve this. I'd like to use "Top level Intro" in the template but with the text from the top level topic, is there any way to do this?

[Tim Green]

Is there any way to solve this. I'd like to use "Top level Intro" in the template but with the text from the top level topic, is there any way to do this?

The Top Level Intro is a page in the template itself, so it won't normally include topic content. You could add topic content that fits on not more than one page using the Text Snippet tool in the Insert menu. There you can create a rectangle that sources the content of a topic referenced by its topic ID, but I wouldn't really recommend this for this purpose.

However, from your description I'm not quite sure what the problem is. The Intro page is like a cover page for the top level chapters and will be the first page of the chapter if you include it. If you don't, the top level topic will be the first page.

[_Nicholas]

Hi Tim, Thanks for the reply,

The problem is, if I include the intro page it still includes the top level topic page as the second page. Is there a way to exclude the top level topic page?

[Alexander Halser]

You cannot avoid the topic text from the top-level chapter being printed. But you can exclude the text from PDF with conditional text tags, so the top-level chapter appears empty in PDF but displays a page in HTML. In the PDF manual template, you need delete all print elements from the top-level band in the "TOPICS" section and make it very small.

[Alexander Halser]

If you want any text on the top-level-intro page (besides the heading and the chapter number), you could use the topic description and repeat the topic's content in plain text there. The standard template contains a text box on the top-level-intro page that refers to the description of the chapter topic.