Chapter Titles in Master Page Footers

Gotya. Create a new project. Use the deafalt CSS. Create two or three sections. Does that have the same problem?

If I place the "Chapter Title" placeholder into the header or footer, what I see throughout the document is the name of the first section that I have in the TOC. And it carries that throughout the manual.

So formatting the placeholder in the heading 2 style basically returns the topmost section in the RoboHelp TOC formatted as a heading 2.

I don't have access to a RoboHelp machine at the moment but it feels like you are trying to make RoboHelp do things the way In Design worked. Good luck! ☺️

You add the Chapter Title field to a master page and apply a style from your CSS. What is that not giving you? 

The only other way I can think of doing it is to create a master page for each chapter, that displays the Chapter Title text as I would like it to be. But that would mean creating over 40 master pages, which doesn't seem to be a practical solution.

I'm still not sure if I am explaining this right.

I don't want to change the style of the "Chapter Title" variable. What I need to do is let that "Chapter Title" know that it needs to pull the text from the latest "Heading 2" to display as the chapter title. 

As the PDF is compiled, it goes in order from first to last topic.  Right now, the "Chapter Title" variable seems to display the project name throughout as the PDF is being compiled. 

In order to get my TOC to display correctly, I had to assign heading styles to my pages as follows:

H1 = Section Head

H2 = Chapter Title
H3 = Topic Heading 1
H4= Topic Heading 2

H5 = Topic Heading 3

So ... in order for that "Chapter Title" variable to work as it did in InDesign is, I would need something to tell the Chapter Title variable ... "OK. When you get to the Chapter Title variable on THIS page, look back to the most recent text that was assigned the H2 heading (Chapter Title) and put that samt text in the footer as the chapter title.

Does that help clarify the question?

Sorry but that's not how RoboHelp works. Variables just take on the style of the paragraph they are in. If they are in a standalone paragraph or something like a heading, then you can apply a style there. You can't automatically apply a style to a variable.

Perhaps it's related to the difference between an online toc and a print (book) toc?

Maybe you need to set up a book toc with sections and then "chapter title" is the name of the section?

https://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/rh_tour/rh2020/toc_index_glossary/toc.htm

Sorry I can't help much on this as I don't currently have a copy of RH2020 and RH2019 is very very different in this regard.

I haven't found a way to do what I was hoping to do so I will try to explain it more clearly. Maybe this can be added as a feature request if there is no solution.

In InDesign, you could create variables and point those variables to a specific paragraph style. For example, I would create a variable named SectionHead, and point it to the SectionHead paragraph style. That would go in the header.  Then the footer would contain the ChapName variable (pointed to the ChapTitle paragraph style), and a page number variable.

As the PDF was built, the most recent section name would appear in the header, and the most recent chapter would appear in the footer.

The below image shows how I am identifying Section Heads and Chapter Titles in my current RoboHelp project:

So, let's say I enter the "Chapter Title" variable or field that RoboHelp has in the Variable/Snippet/Field chooser. When I generate the PDF, the field seems to be picking up the project name, when what I WANT to appear there is whatever the most recent Heading 2 heading is. Does that make it more clear what I am trying to accomplish, and would there be a way to do this in RoboHelp?

OK thanks I will investigate further.

If the style is in a CSS that is linked to the master page, you can apply it. The master page CSS overrides the topic CSS if different. So whatever is in the CSS file(s) attached to the master page can be used.

You also need to be aware that a new project created in 2020 will have a book.css. It might be worth creating a new project in Update 1 and adding that to your master page. Open it in the CSS editor to see what styles it has. It should be the bottom CSS in Properties below your main CSS.