tables not printing?

Forum|Forum|18 years ago
October 15, 2007
3 replies
918 views

I'm having problems with tables in my printed documentation. If I include my online header and footers (which are formatted as tables in the topic template), the conversion to Word works as it should. However, if I hide (use conditional build tags for) the online header and footers, any tables and any topic text that precedes the tables do not convert.

Here's what I've done:
1) I've generated Printed Documentation with no conditional build tags applied. Everything comes through, including tables. My styles map as they should. The only problem is that my online headers and footers (which are defined in the topic template) show up at the top and bottom of every converted topic, which is not what I want.

2) To get rid of the online headers and footers, I marked them as "online" in my topic template. When I generate the printed document, I set the Conditional Build Expression to "NOT online." Again, the styles map as they should, but many topics are incomplete. I figured out that topics that include tables are converting incorrectly. Specificially, all topic text before a table is missing, all table text is missing, and any text after the table is unformatted. As soon as a new topic without a table appears in the Word file, the formatting is fine.

3) To test whether the online header/footers were causing the problem, I removed the topic template from a topic that had a table and regenerated the printed documentation. Sure enough, the table in THAT one topic converted correctly.

I suspect that the problem is stemming from some sort of nested table issue between the table in the header of my document(which I'm attempting to suppress with conditional text) and the tables in the body of my document. How can I get my topic tables to convert while still hiding the tables in my headers?

Documentation

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Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Just zip it up and send it via the Contact page of my site. I am assuming it will be fairly small. Anything much over say 5mb, let me know first though please.

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Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Kathy

You say:

****************************************

Here's what I've done:
1) I've generated Printed Documentation with no conditional build tags applied. Everything comes through, including tables. My styles map as they should. The only problem is that my online headers and footers (which are defined in the topic template) show up at the top and bottom of every converted topic, which is not what I want.

****************************************

I think a lot of people would like to know how you are getting that to work, even if it is not what you want. Can you recreate that in a test project with just a couple of topics and send it to me please? My own testing and what everyone tells me is that any headers and footers don't make it to the printed output.

The nested tables probably are the issue. Someone contacted me before when they had a problem similar to yours and then advised having found getting rid of the nested tables fixed it. See Other Issues in the Print Issues topic on my site. They didn't mention anything about headers and footers maybe there was a connection.

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MergeThis

Inspiring

Unfortunately, RH doesn't handle conditions in tables very well. That is, when you select a row(s) and assign a condition in WYSIWYG, RH probably didn't do what you expected.

Verify this by looking at the TrueCode; chances are, the x-condition tag is not properly "wrapped around" the TR tag. That is, either the opening x-condition tag follows the opening TR tag, or the closing x-condition tag precedes the closing TR tag. (The same applies if you're conditionalizing an entire table.)

Good luck,
Leon

K

kmaddox1Author

Inspiring

I managed to resolve my dilemma late yesterday when I applied my online condition tag to just the rows in the table, not to the entire table (using View > Tag List). Leon, I suspect you were right that the conditional tag wasn't properly wrapped around the TR codes. As soon as I did that, I could generate the printed documentation correctly -- the online headers and footers did not appear and the tables and topic text converted correctly. But, for some reason, one of the 103 topics in the printed documentation still includes the online header and footer. I checked and it used the same template and there's nothing apparently odd about it--yet every time I convert, that one topic comes through with the online header/footer attached. Very odd.

As for the other comments about online headers and footers not converting--I guess I'm just lucky! When creating the topic template, I simply used the View > Header and View > Footer menu options. The header consists entirely of a table (repeats the name of the book and our corporate logo at the top of each topic). The footer is just text (links to a standard copyright statement). While I was unintentionally able to convert to printed documentation, they ended up within the body of the Word document--not as the header and footer in Word. So there was no advantage to having them.

Here's a copy of the HTML of my template heading. Peter, let me know the best way to send a sample project.

<div placeholder
id=header
style="width: 100%; position: relative;">

<table x-use-null-cells
style="width: 100%;
x-cell-content-align: Center;
border-spacing: 0px;
border-spacing: 0px;"
cellspacing=0
width=100%>
<col style="width: 5%;">
<col style="width: 95%;">

<tr style="x-cell-content-align: center; height: 20px;"
valign=middle>
<td colspan=1
rowspan=1
style="width: 5%;
padding-right: 10px;
padding-left: 10px;
x-condition: Online;"
width=5%>
<p style="text-align: right;"
align=right><img src="!SkinSubFolder!/XP_Blue/logo.large.gif"
x-maintain-ratio=TRUE
style="border: none;
width: 211px;
height: 60px;
float: none;
border-style: none;
border-style: none;"
width=211
height=60
border=0></td>
<td colspan=1
rowspan=1
style="width: 95%;
padding-right: 10px;
padding-left: 10px;
x-condition: Online;"
width=95%>
<p class=DocTitle>Administration User's Guide</td></tr>

<tr style="x-cell-content-align: center; height: 1px;"
valign=middle>
<td rowspan=1
colspan=2
style="width: 5%;
padding-right: 10px;
padding-left: 10px;
border-right-style: none;
border-bottom-style: none;
border-left-style: none;"
width=5%>


<hr style="float: aligncenter;
height: 1px;
margin-top: 0px;
margin-bottom: 0px;
color: #f1bb46;"
align=center
size=1
color=#F1BB46>
</td>
<td_null></tr>
</table>
</div>

(BTW, is there anyway to make "View > Tag List" the default view? It's incredibly useful for selecting just the right bit of text.)

A

Anonymous

Hi, Kathy.

Something about your post sounded familiar, and sure enough, our topic templates have a table in the footer. The footer does not have any build tags applied, and it doesn't import into Printed Doc at all.

Where in your doc template are these header and footer tables? Are they in separate sections (when you're doing a template, the screen has three sections you can type in - header, body, and footer)? Because if the header table, body placeholder text, and footer table are all in the body section of the template, that will cause problems.

If you're not sure about what you're seeing in the WYSIWYG pane for the template, you could post a copy of your template (.htt) file HTML text from the TrueCode pane. That would make troubleshooting easy.

Elisa

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