Inspiring

Question

RH 2020 - how to get a perfect pdf or word output when starting a fresh

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
November 12, 2020
3 replies
402 views

We have an online help and few chapters from the help will also be used in a training guide.

We are generating a Word document from RH 2020.

What is the best way to use a word template? Any best practice or suggestion here?

I tried adding a cover page but it did not show up in the output.

Some outputs came out correctly but after I supplied our custom word template now it gives me an error saying Failed to generate printed documentation layout.

any tips on bext way to use RH for a clean PDF or Word output so that the manual effort after the word generation is minimal?

New UI

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Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Master page headers and footers do not make it to Word. It's explained in Word Output (grainge.org) and the link above.

Online your output will use the masterpage defined for the topics and that seems to be working. For Word your header and footer need to come from a Word template.

The output is less configurable than in Classic and I have raised a number of issues with Adobe. For now though I have documented how it does work.

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Peter Grainge

Community Expert

I have created a tutorial for both the Word and the PDF outputs. You can view it from my site and also download a demo project to play with.

https://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/printing/printing.htm

It's also worth taking a look at the Word Output and PDF Output topics in the About RoboHelp sample project.

I hestitate about saying you can get a perfect document from either as page breaks, table splits and suchlike are near impossible. What you can do is get something as close as possible. That is why I always favour the Word output as with a few macros and a few minutes work, you can tweak it and then create your PDF.

That said, a lot of work has been done to improve the PDF output. It is all going to depend on your content.

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Tejas DandekarAuthor

Inspiring

I have a scenario where:

I have 15 topics in the help. All 15 topics are part of a Responsive HTML5 online help. They use the onlinehelp masterpage.

All these 15 topics also need to be part of (shared for) printed documentation (word). When I pull them in the printed output toc, the master page applied to online help is still applicable.

The onlinehelp masterpage doesn't have page numbers in the footer. So when I output word, the output shows up without page numbers.

I created a different master page for printed output to be used with the printed output toc. But how do I apply it to the shared topics?

We want shared topics to show in the help without footer/page numbers and in the word output with footer/page numbers.

Any pointers?

K

Karin Albrecht

Legend

In my opinion, the PDF output requires a lot less manual effort than the Word output, especially with regards to images and tables. I usually create my PDFs like this:

- create different master pages for all front matter topics (Cover, TOC) and content pages, using different headers and footers

- create cover page in RH as I want it

- adjust the necessary styles in the "book" css

- assign my usual css and the book css to all master pages I use in the output

- create the PDF using the advanced setting "embed used fonts"

Thats basically how I do it. For me, this works fine.

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