RH 2020 New UI - Creating a front cover for PDF output

[joannah98656944]

I want to create a topic in my RH 2020 project for the front cover of my pdf output. I want the background of front cover to be all one colour. However, when I do this to my topic, there is a margin round the outside that is white, and the background colour does not cover the whole of an A4 page. How do I configure my topic to do this?

[Peter Grainge]

Please use the link to insert photos rather than attaching them. It overcomes a bug in this forum.

The PDF preset has a margin defined. You can set that to zero but it will apply to all pages and I doubt you want that for the topics.

Also I found that whilst that allowed me to set a colour for the body background that did cover the whole area, that colour was then applied to all topics even though they had their own CSS applied. I tried to get round that by using master pages but no joy.

I will take that up with Adobe as it seems like a bug.

Bear in mind that whilst both PDF and Word outputs can be viewed online, they are intended to be printed so they must have a margin as few printers will print to the edge of the paper.

[joannah98656944]

Thank you for your help Peter. I see your point about the margins. I think my front cover might need a redesign. 

[Peter Grainge]

I have referred the cover page background applying to all pages to Adobe. You should be able to have a coloured background, albeit not the whole page.

Another consideration though is using some colour is fine but if anyone prints a page with a whole coloured background you are draining a lot of toner.

A coloured margin can look good but then you hit problems with different page sizes. A4 versus Letter.

[joannah98656944]

Hi again  I did not ask you how you applied that background colour? Did you had a style="backgroundcolour" to your body tag?

[Peter Grainge]

Yes. Background colour in the body tag.

I guess another way would be a single cell table with a background that pretty much covers the page.

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

Adobe have come back with a solution that you could apply to get a full background colour for the cover page.

Add this rule to the CSS that will apply to the cover page. 

@page :-ro-nth(1 of bodyPage){

  margin: 0cm !important;   

  background-color: red;

}

Red can of course be changed to an RGB or Hex value.

[D.Desmet]

Trying to get my cover page right in the PDF. The cover page is an A4 PDF and the page size of the PDF output is also A4. I saw that my cover page was scaled, so I searched for a solution and found this topic.

Unfortunately, adding the following (without the color because I don't need that) to the css that I use for topics, still scales my cover page.

@page :-ro-nth(1 of bodyPage){ margin: 0cm !important; }

I already tried changing page margin to 0. This indeed changes the margin for the topic pages, but not of the cover page.

What did I miss?

[joannah98656944]

Thank you very much Peter. This worked for me. 

[Peter Grainge]

@D.Desmet The cover page in the source needs to be a topic, not a PDF. Add the topic in the Front Matter section of the TOC.

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[D.Desmet]

It works with a PDF that I added to the front matter! Is the fact that PDF page can be selected for front matter and that it gets in the output a hidden or a known feature? If it is not the intention, it shouldn't be possible to select a PDF.

Strange that these PDFs are scaled and pushed against the top of the page. A logical default behaviour would be no scaling and the availability of settings to choose the scaling and position on the page.

Since I can't wait for an update of this feature (?), I will try with a topic like you say.