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Question

Printing issues with RH9 Webhelp

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
August 23, 2011
2 replies
1387 views

Hello,

We've recently converted our chm help to webhelp, and along with that upgraded from RH8 to RH9.

We're encountering an issue where webhelp content, including the TOC pane and the topic content, doesn't print. Selecting to print results in blank pages with some formatting marks (you can see where the TOC would go, fex), but no content.

However, if you print preview and then print, the content will print, although there still seems to be some wonkiness (blank pages, etc.).

This is on multiple machines, both IE and Firefox. Is there a project setting I'm not seeing, or a browser setting (for multiple browsers) at work here?

Thanks in advance,

WebHelp

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Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Alternatively you could try adding a Print button to the toolbar. Hopefully that will print the topic. See Snippets on my site.

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

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T

Tech_Writer_KCAuthor

Known Participant

I tried the snippet instructions but I'm running in an issue of the button not showing in the actual webhelp.

I've set it up in the skin editor, and it shows on the editor's preview pop-up, but when I generate the actual help, it's not there.

Captiv8r

Legend

Hello again

Remember, when you add a custom button you also have to enable it in the SSL recipe.

Look at the options where you specify buttons. Likely it's not selected.

Cheers... Rick

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Captiv8r

Legend

Hi there

You know, there is likely a very good reason Adobe doesn't even offer a print option in their AIR Help viewer. What they do is what I'll recommend to you.

Create a PDF and insert that as a Baggage file. Then advise users to open the PDF if they wish to commit the electronic information to a dead tree last century medium.

Cheers... Rick

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T

Tech_Writer_KCAuthor

Known Participant

Rick - I'm a bit confused. Are you indicating that Adobe intentionally doesn't provide print support for Webhelp systems???

I was under the impression that Webhelp should print easily, that our issue was merely something wrong with our help or browser configuration. Are you saying the default behavior is no support at all?

Captiv8r

Legend

Hello again

I'm not sure anything is "intentional" to discourage printing. Nor am I sure where you managed to get the impression that WebHelp handles it with aplomb. Have you been talking to sales again?

Printing from *ANY* help system is always going to be less than stellar. This is because you are effectively putting what appears on the screen (and has been designed to work well there) on paper (where it wasn't optimized).

Any printing that would occur directly from the help system is going to be a kludge and likely won't appear anything close to what you really hoped for. That's why we suggest PDF. You make the PDF look like you want and the printed output from the PDF looks good too!

So I'm not saying there is no support at all, but what you are asking is similar to asking if a Jaguar would be a good vehicle to haul a load of fill dirt to your backyard. Sure, you can do it, but why? Rent a truck (lorry in Peter's terms) and do the job right. In other words, use PDF for its strengths.

Cheers... Rick

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