RH printed material as a word Doc runs off pages.

[josephseyljf01]

Hello,

Using RH 2015, I was taking a document I had and putting it into a word document (printed material) format.

What I noticed was some areas run off the page. It is almost like there is no margins set for all parts of the robohelp project.

For the tables, I could go through and fix individually within Word by selecting the whole table that is off the page, right click, Autofit, Autofit to contents. This would be an ineffective way though being as everytime I publish (2x a year) I would have to repeat the same fields over and over again. (And it is 9000+ pages) Plus I still am unsure how i would fix the words running off the page still from within Word.

How can I fix it from the source within RH? Have everything correct margin wise before I go to print?

[Peter Grainge]

Thread moved to correct forum. RoboHelp for Word is a separate program that was used to author the help in Word. It no longer ships.

I am assuming you are using the Printed Documentation layout rather than pasting the text.

It's a case of tracking down what is causing that overrun, as I'm sure you realise.

• Size of a nearby image?
• Width of a table?
• The style applied in RoboHelp?
• If you are mapping to a template, something in that template.
• If you are not mapping to a template, try that instead.

Sorry but there's no easy answer. Take another look and post back any thoughts, even if they sound wacky. There are some pages on my site about Printed Output.

On the tables, I had problems regarding size and formatting so I wrote some Word macros. Take a look at Word Macros​ on my site. There are several for tables and I think one will suit, albeit you will need to edit it to suit the formatting you want.

Post back if you cannot get anywhere with the overrun issue.

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See www.grainge.org for free RoboHelp and Authoring information.

@petergrainge

[josephseyljf01]

I will have to check. This document was started over 15 years ago and edited by multiple people as documenters before me came and went. Up until I took a 2 day course with iconlogic in 2017, I had never touched RH in my life. From what I do see, there was no CSS applied. I tried a section of document that I knew ran over the margins in word, and put the output to RHStyleMapping.css. It didn't work.

I do know one solution though not the best. This would be to take the .doc or docx after Robohelp and just view it in web layout. Not too hard to do from a client side.

That works just fine for most, but their our clients that want it in pdf format and when I convert a word to pdf with the tools I have, the cut off words do not reformat themselves to fit in say .5" margins or even 1", etc.

I will casually work through your list of ideas you gave me and see if any work and let you know.

[Peter Grainge]

Is this problem just in the PDF or in Word also?

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See www.grainge.org for free RoboHelp and Authoring information.

@petergrainge

[josephseyljf01]

It falls in both. (But I only export printed material as a word doc and convert it to pdf via Nitro.) Nitro is just going off what it see's from the Word doc. I didn't know this was an issue until a customer said it was because 95% of the time they just view it as a webhelp or .chm.  I assume my issue is indeed within RH but only certain project files. This is why I believe if I can find the cause in RH I can correct the issues all at once.

[Peter Grainge]

If you can share the project, I will take a quick look for obvious issues. See the Contact page on my site and send the project as instructed there. Do make sure you include a link to this thread and please do not email the project direct. Some notes about where to look would help.

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See www.grainge.org for free RoboHelp and Authoring information.

@petergrainge

[josephseyljf01]

Hello,

Long time no chat. I am embarrassed to say I have been dealing with this since 2017. I would print my materials and just fix the tables/margins that overlapped by creating the word doc, select all, and change the margins to half inch.

Finally.. now that I have some time I discovered how to fix both.

For tables - doing autofit to screen solved them from running over.

For the margins.. I scrolled all the way to the right and found that the right-hand margin was set to 22". I checked another Topic from my Project Manager that I knew worked and saw that the margins for it were set to 13.5". I figured I would try that, so I did a ctrl + a and adjusted the entire topic to 13.5 (though it still seemed big to me) and lo and behold.. IT WORKED!. 

We produce documentation once a year so this means for the past 4 years I was just fixing every topic that was not correct post-printed material instead of fixing the root. (Very time consuming) Happy to say I will no longer have to do that! 🙂 (Side note: I did discover how to use Word to export to PDF as well as using Robohelp itself... The only reason I used Word first was to fix the margin errors then would publish it but now it seems I can just stick to using Robohelp! 🙂 )

[Peter Grainge]

That must be a record response. 🙂

Glad it is sorted.

________________________________________________________
See www.grainge.org for free Authoring and RoboHelp Information