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IrishPhil
Participant
November 22, 2013
Question

Anyone having troubles creating PDFs?

  • November 22, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 1010 views

Hello...having trouble with both methods of outputting PDFs, both Single Source Layouts - Printed Documentation and Review - Create PDF for Review. Both outputs have their good and bad points, however I have settled on the Printed Doc as the least work to make respectable.

I'm working with RH v10 and Acrobat XI Pro.

I do have problems like blank pages, easy to delete but the page numbering is then wrong. Does anyone know how to get rid of page numbering? It happens even when I use a custom master page with no numbering.

But by far my biggest issue is with two long tables refusing to print beyond one page resulting in many of the rows being lost. I've gotten round it by using the Review PDF and pasting that in but it's time consuming and has different formatting, and of course that puts the page numbering out as well.

I think this is very poor of Adobe, I'm really sorry I started using the RH editing instead of leaving the source in FrameMaker or Word. (My main output is WebHelp). But you live and learn.

Thanks for any help, I probably won't be able to reply before Wed 27th.

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1 reply

Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
November 24, 2013

Before blaming Adobe, let's find out what the problem is.

Tables normally work just fine. If you open the Employee Care project you will see the topics have lots of tables and they all print across pages.

How were you creating the tables that would not print to a second page? New one on me.

Can you pop one of your topics with a problem table into a new project and send it to me as instructed on the Contact page on my site?

The headers and footers are created automatically and you cannot suppress their creation. Why remove the page numbers? Surely your users want them to use from the TOC. The TOC can easily be updated after editing, just right click to the right of the TOC in Word and you will see an Update option.

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

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IrishPhilAuthor
Participant
November 28, 2013

Apologies for delay in responding Peter and thanks for your help. I returned to work yesterday but unfortunately the new laptop with RoboHelp 10 (and Technical Suite) is having comms issues. Someone is coming to look at that now, meanwhile I am trying to install Tech Suite on another laptop.

This is all taking time of course. Maybe one of the topics with the problem table (there are two but others print out fine) would be of some use. As per your Contact page, I sent it with cutesendit.com

This is my first project in using RoboHelp. We have huge amounts of legacy text and I can't remember whether I imported this table or used cut-and-paste from HTML. I have looked at the HTML code of the topic but didn't see much there.

Thanks again.

I
IrishPhilAuthor
Participant
November 29, 2013

I can't believe I am alone in having troubles with PDF output from RH (v10 as it happens) so here's an update on this.

First of all, I do think that if your company produces PDFs for clients, as complementary to WebHelp, then you should use FrameMaker or Word for your source files and for editing. Then import to RH when creating WebHelp output. There are simply too many issues when creating PDFs from RH, and too much manual manoevering to get round them. I haven't seen issues with importing these files into RH in other projects.

My chief difficulties were that two tables in our English RH files refused to print beyond a page in Printed Documentation whereas in the Japanese translations that returned from our vendor, nearly all the tables went off the page horizontally, again resulting in loss of text. In addition, the PDF output had seemingly arbitrary blank pages inserted.

I got round the table issue as follows: 1. Copy a table from the WebHelp output and paste into Word, save. 2. Import to RH, creating a HTML file. 3. Open this file in a browser, copy the table, and paste into the RH topic. This worked, all other options I tried did not.

I got round the blank page and other formatting issues by outputting to Word from RH and working on the file there before outputting to PDF.

I hope others can benefit from my experience.

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