Printed Output

If you want to print this topic with all the dropdowns included, click the Show All button and then print.

Producing a Document

In RoboHelp Project Manager you will see a folder called Single Source Layouts, start by expanding that to see the options. These will be slightly different in X3 but we are only concerned with one item, Printed Documentation.

If you will only be producing one document, you can leave the default name.

If you will be producing multiple documents, I suggest you right click the folder and rename it to something meaningful for the first document you will create. For illustration, I have set up multiple layouts with clear names.

The Wizard - Page 1 - General

Double click the required print layout and the wizard will open as below.

Let's take a look at each part of this page.

When you have finished setting up this page of the wizard, click the Next button.

The Wizard - Page 2 - Content

By default the Content page will display the TOC view of the project and include all the topics in the TOC under the appropriate books. It is here that you define the body of your document.

If the topics in your TOC are exactly what you want in the printed output, you need only select whether or not to Maintain HTML heading levels field as required and carry on. Whilst we will be staying with the defaults for now, let's look at the options.

1. If you do not want anything that relates to Module B. Simply highlight that book and click the single left facing arrow. Module B will no longer appear in the list but note what has happened in the topics pane.

The turquoise tint in the book for Module A is an indicator that all the topics in that book are in the printed output. If any or all the topics under that book in the TOC are not in the printed output, then the tint will be cream as shown for Module B.

2. Note that books under Chapter Layout equal chapters in your document. The book icon under Chapter Layout enables you to create chapters in your document that do not match books in your TOC. This can be very useful where you need a different structure in the printed output. You can change the title of the chapters but it is a bit tricky. Click here for instructions.

 

Click the pencil icon and change the name. Do not click outside the box in which you are typing. Leave the box as if you wanted to carry on typing so that the cursor is still flashing and click the Finish button. It does not move on to the next screen. While you are editing the book name, the Finish button is effectively a Save button.

3. Your TOC may not include topics that you want in the printed output. Click the Topics dropdown and select the folder that contains the topic or select All Folders.

Again, thanks to the highlighting, note how easy it is to see what is already in the print layout and what is not. Simply add the required additional topics to your layout in the position required. Either drag and drop or use the various arrows. The use of that Show All Topics check box is described in Build Expressions in the table under Step 1.

4. You may not want chapters in your document, simply a series of topics. If you click on a book and hit Delete or use the left arrow, not only will the book be deleted from the layout, so will the topics under it. You can move them up first and then delete or delete and add them back in. A lot will depend on the complexity of what you are doing and you will soon figure out the optimum method. Also bear in mind that without books, each topic in the printed output will be a Word section in the printed output. Whether or not that is an issue depends on what you want to do with the document. I simply make the point so that you are aware of it.

5. If your Table of Contents has books with links, then if the book is in your print layout, the topic will print automatically. Many people do not realise that, add the topic itself and then wonder why it prints twice.

We will accept the default layout, which just leaves the Maintain HTML heading levels field to be set. The chapter (book) will be assigned Heading 1 in your printed output so if the topic also starts with Heading 1, that will get bumped down to Heading 2. That may give you a different output to what you want so if you want the topic to retain its Heading 1, tick this check box as I will in creating this output. More on this later.

When you have finished setting up this page of the wizard, click the Next button.

In response to a RoboHelp forum post, I devised an alternative way of creating your layout which you may prefer. Click here.

The Wizard - Page 3 - Section Layout

This is new in X5. If you are using X3, skip to the next section.

This new page allows you to make various changes which previously could only be made in finished document.

Field / Button	About
	The right window shows the order of the default sections. You can: Delete any that you do not require. Insert pre-existing Word documents after any of the sections. Add topics after any of the sections.
	This icon allows you to add new sections to your document. First highlight the section after which the new section is to appear. If you click this button with all the default sections shown, a browse window will open allowing you to navigate to any Word document. Its file name will become the name of that section and the content of the Word document will appear in the finished document produced from this layout. This can be used to insert a disclaimer or copyright notice. If you want the document to appear after more than one section, click the Add icon again to display the Sections dialog box. Select the document from the dropdown list. To add further documents, click to standard Windows folder icon on the Sections dialog box. If you delete any of the default sections, they will also appear in the dropdown enabling you to add them back in.
	Highlight any section and click this icon to delete the section. TIP: Delete the default Title page, click the Add icon and navigate to your own cover page.
	This icon will be enabled if you have added a Word document to the sections. Click the icon to edit the document in Word.
	Highlight any section to move it up in the list.
	Highlight any section to move it down in the list.

When you have finished setting up this page of the wizard, click the Next button.

The Wizard - Page 4 - Appearance

OK, welcome to the party as this is where the fun starts. The default as you come into this page is as above.

You have three options in the dropdown.

For now we will select the Style Mapping template so that you can see what it produces. You will see that Map Non-Heading Styles frame is enabled, as it would be if you selected "Use a Word template". RH will attempt to work out which styles in your project map to which styles in the template but you can override these choices and set any that RH cannot figure out. I use this to change the style I use in tables in my project to Word's normal style.

One thing to note is that when you click the dropdown on the right, it will not show all the styles in the Word template that you are using, RH will only display those that it regards as being appropriate to the style to which you are mapping. Matthew Ellison advises me that if the RH styles include bullets or numbering, then only the bulleted and numbered styles in Word are listed. Note however that elsewhere I caution against using numbered styles in RH.

Click any one of the styles and you can then Preview the appearance of the characters, a whole paragraph or the style properties.

Now just click the Finish button and wait for RH to generate the document. When done, you will be able to select View Result or Done. That's it, you have your printed output so we can all go home. It's not quite what you want? OK let's look further.

Template Hierarchy

Before we look at making any changes, it is important that you understand the template hierarchy.

Style Mapping Template

The master copy, as I will call it, gets installed with RH and can be found in the folder \Program Files\RoboHelp Office\RoboHTML\PrintDocExt. If you select this template from the dropdown, RH will copy it to your project without telling you. Any changes you make in the document that you save to the template, will be saved to the copy only, not the master. More than a few people have changed the master and wondered why they don't see the changes in their project. Joel Dezenzio also reports that it may be found in Documents and Settings. Check for the existence of the template there and if you find it, click here.

If you want to make changes to the template, you need to ask yourself whether they just relate to the project you are working on or any project you will ever create. Then you can decide which template you change. For example, being UK based, I want my printed output to be A4 but I want different styles for different projects. The changes I want in all printed output I make to the master template, the changes for a specific project are then made in the copy.

Note: Before you make ANY change to the master template, save a copy of it to somewhere you can find it later.

· If you have problems you may want to revert to a clean version.

· If you contact Macromedia Support, it would not be unreasonable for them to ask you to test the problem on the template as supplied.

The Standard Output

So let's look at the standard output from the Style Mapping template. We will examine changing that later.

Structure

In Word, select the Normal View so that you can see the section breaks that have been created. If you are using X3 they will all be Odd Page Sections breaks. With X5 the Advanced button on Page 1 of the wizard lets you select ordinary section breaks. But section breaks there will be as that is programmed into RH.

First let's see where they appear:

• After the cover page
• After the contents page
• After each chapter in your document.

Headings

The name of the first chapter will appear first on the first page of that chapter!

The name of the first topic will appear below it in the same heading level because we elected to maintain heading levels in page 2 of the wizard.

Headers and Footers

Oh the fun these cause! What you get is this, there's not even a choice of take it or leave it, at this stage.

Headers

• There is no header on the first page of a chapter.
• On left hand pages, you will then get the name of the document.
• On right hand pages, you will then get the name of the chapter.

Footers

• The contents pages have Roman numerals.
• The body of the topic has Arabic numerals right and left aligned as appropriate.

Styles

Not much to say here. You will either like them or want to change them. The latter is covered in the next section.

Just one thing to cover now. You will notice a lot of styles in the dropdown list and some of them will look familiar. In addition to the styles RH supply, any extra styles from your normal template will be added and I will expand on this in a later version of this topic. If you really do not want them there, then I can you might like to visit www.tech-tav.com where you can download some free macros, one of which removes unused styles from a Word document.

Tables

If your online help has tables with borders and those tables cross page breaks in the printed output, you will see that the border prints at the bottom of a page but not at the top. I have not found any way to prevent that. Again, we will cover what can be done about tables in the next section.

Numbering

To explain numbering here will be too distracting. It borders on being a black art. I have decided this is best dealt with in a separate topic. Click here to find out more about numbering.

Page Size and Dictionary

Before making any changes to the template, the page size will be Letter Size and the Dictionary used will be the US dictionary. For rest of the world outside the USA we will change those in the next section!

Summary

Now if all that sounds like the Style Mapping template is not worth using, then let me emphasise that is not what I am saying. For many users it will be absolutely fine and it really does do a good job. The point is that many companies quite reasonably want their corporate style and other individual requirements come into play.

For what it is worth, I use a customised version of the Style Mapping template to create my documentation and then transfer the content to my own template when it is signed off and ready to go out the door. At that point, I use my own template.

Changing the Output

Here I will revisit the headings in the previous section and explain what you can do to get the document the way you want it.

Structure

As far as I can see, there is nothing you can do to stop RH creating the section breaks in Word. Remember this is where they appear:

• After the cover page
• After the contents page
• After each chapter in your document.

So what can you do if the section breaks give you a problem?

Well probably the section breaks after the cover page and the contents page are not the ones that give you a problem. It's more likely that it's the ones after each chapter.

The first obvious answer is to avoid creating chapters by not having the books in page 2 of the wizard, just list the topics.

If you do need the books then you can remove the section breaks and perhaps replace them with page breaks. You can do this using Word's Find and Replace clicking the More button and looking under Special making sure you set the Search to Down. This will most likely affect the page numbering and headers and footers. It may also change the preceding section type.

I came to the conclusion that it is more trouble than it is worth so this is what I do with the output.

1. Replace ALL the section breaks with page breaks.
2. Select the body of the document making sure I do not select the final paragraph marker. Avoiding that final paragraph mark is important as if you do not, the headers and footers will be carried into the new document.
3. Paste that all into a new document that is set up the way you want.

Headings

If there is a book in your list of topics, its name will precede the first topic and it will use Heading 1. What else happens depends on whether or not you choose to maintain Maintain HTML Heading Levels in page 2 of the wizard.

Maintain HTML Heading Levels Selected

Assuming your topics start with Heading 1 style, both the chapter and topic name will be in the same style. If their titles are both the same, then it can look odd as there is nothing to indicate their different roles. You either need to name your books in the TOC to avoid any confusion or rename the book in page 2 of the wizard, perhaps just adding the word Chapter after it. The rename icon is on the toolbar just above the list of topics.

Maintain HTML Heading Levels Not Selected

If you have chapters defined, then they will appear in Heading 1 and every heading from RH will be moved down one level. Thus anything that is Heading 1 will get changed to Heading 2 and all other headings will get bumped down by one level.

That should not be an issue unless you produce some documents with chapters and others without from the same project. Those that have chapters will convert all RH headings down one level whereas the others will leave the levels unchanged. As a result, one document will have topics with Heading 2 and another document will have topics with Heading 1.

I suggest you would need two templates with the styles set up to address this.

Headers and Footers

By now you have probably reached the point where you have figured that no matter what template you use, you are going to get RH's headers and footers? Absolutely right. Even if you use a template that has your preferred headers and footers, RH will apply its own. If you have a document with lots of section breaks, setting up what you want can be tiresome. I suggest you follow the same procedure I described under Structure, click here to see it again.

Styles

Two rules.

1. Think about which template you are going to edit.

• To change the current project only, change the copy in the project.

• To change all future projects, change the master copy.

• To change both, change the master copy and copy that to the project unless the project copy has styles not in the master. Then you need to use Word's style organiser.

Reread Template Hierarchy if in doubt.

2. Open the Style Mapping template in Word but do not directly change anything you see there.

• Make the style changes via Word's Format menu, selecting Styles and Formatting. How  you make the changes will vary from version to version and I am going to assume you know how to do that.

• Alternatively, you can use the Style Organiser to import the style from some other template.

Tables

If your online help has tables with borders and those tables cross page breaks in the printed output, you will see that the border prints at the bottom of a page but not at the top. As I indicate earlier, you cannot prevent that. Take a look at the topic on Word macros though and you will find some macros that you can use to rework the tables quite painlessly.

Numbering

Click here to find out more about numbering.

Page Size and Dictionary

Well where I come from "Grey is not my favourite colour" and I would print that on A4 paper. On the basis there are more people outside the USA than inside, I guess one could argue that is the same for most people!

Now before you guys in the USA get all upset, I am just joking and gently chiding Macromedia for not offering two templates. That's all.

So just for the rest of the world, if you are using the Style Mapping template, here's what you do.

Noting what I have said about the template hierarchy, change the master copy of Style Mapping so that it uses the dictionary you want and outputs to A4 or your preferred size. If you have read this after setting up various projects, you need to make the same change to the copy in the project.

Links

The links in your help look just like links in the printed documentation output. Just one tiny problem. They don't work as links, click them and nothing happens. These are your options:

1. Create each link in Word! A macro was posted on the RoboHelp forum for this but it requires that the link and the target both have exactly the same string. There are also some spacing issues. See Print Issues for more information.

2. Accept that the links don't work and add an explanation in the printed output covering the fact that these are active links in the online help only.

3. Use Build Tags. Apply say the default ONLINE expression to the link in the online help so that it does not appear in the printed output. Instead the printed output will include what you add using the PRINT tag where you can make it look like normal text or your own preference.

4. Wait for the next version of RoboHelp which is expected to make the links work in the printed output.

If any of your links are to popup windows, there's another little problem. These links will appear as normal text! This is a reported bug but please report it again if it affects you as that increases the chances of it being fixed. The only workaround is to adapt point 3 above so that the links appear as you want.

I am grateful to Leon Descoteaux for the idea of using Build Tags to reformat links pending the next version of RoboHelp.

Creating More than One Layout

You do not have to keep changing what you set up under Printed Documentation to get different outputs. Simply right click on Single Source Layouts and create as many as you want.

A few tips here to help you create additional layouts.

• If the layout is completely different to any existing layout, the simply right click and select New Layout.

• If it is similar to one you already have, right click and select Duplicate Layout. Then just make the changes. If the first layout was time consuming to set up, this method can save a lot of time.

• If you regularly map your RoboHelp styles to one Word template, or just a few, save yourself the trouble of setting up the mapping each time. This also ensures each document has the same mapping and their appearance is consistent. Right click a layout where you have already mapped the styles and export the style map to where it can be accessed in future. When you need that mapping again, just right click and import it into another layout.

Deleting a Layout

The details of the layout are contained in the file printdoclayout.xml. There will be numbered versions of this if you have more than one layout. You delete this file and next time you go to the wizard, the default list of topics will be there and you can start again. If you have several files, you will have to open them in a text editor and look at the end of the file to know which file relates to which layout.

There is an easier way. Doing it how Macromedia meant you to!! In page 2 of the wizard, simply click on the double headed left arrow!

To delete the other settings, I am told that in X3 you can delete the hpr file and let RH rebuild it the next time you open the project. (X5 at least does not have such a file.) However, if I wanted to get back to a default layout, I would simply right click the one I no longer want and select Delete and then create a new one. As with the topics, I can see nothing wrong with doing it as Macromedia intended.

Print Issues

Problems with Word failing to generate an output or the content having missing or duplicated topics are covered in here.

Feedback

It is impossible to cover everything but I have tried to cover the main areas. Let me know if you find any errors or if I have missed something that is of general interest and I'll be happy to consider updating the topic.

Click this link to email me.

Topic Revisions