RoboHelp 2015: Provide a print button to print the displayed of help

[mdawn0817]

My employer is asking me to give the end user the ability to print one page of the help. For example, display a topic the way they want. Click a button in the task bar that prints to their attached printer. I'm linking to field definition pages and those need to print as well.

Is there a way to do this?

Also, they want a way for the customers to be able to print the entire published help (I know, I know). I'm assuming I will need to create a pdf document of the entire help system. Can I include that pdf in the Master Project? Or can I provide a printed version of each child project and provide the pdf in each child project and print from there in the published and generated help?

Thanks for your help,

MDawn

[mdawn0817]

To add more information to my recent post. I found that the skin I am using, Orb, has a print button which I had not selected. I selected it and regenerated the help and the print button now appears. However, when I click on it nothing happens. Is there something else I need to do to get the network printer to attach automatically? Will we have to follow a similar process at each customer site to get the printer to attach?

Also, from the skin editor there are other widgets appearing in the skin, however, they do not appear in the generated help file.

Thanks, again, in advance for all your help,

MDawn

[Peter Grainge]

Print should print the open topic without any further work on your part.

Try generating some webhelp and printing from that to prove printing is set up OK. If that works and Responsive does not, post back.

As to printing the whole lot, yes you will have to create a PDF. I'll bet the IT and Admin people at the first place where someone prints the whole help will not love you for jamming up their printer.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring information

@petergrainge

[John_Meidl]

I have same request: How can a user print a topic?

When I try to print from the online help (as attached to the application) and when on Google Chrome, only the first page and the TOC print. (I want the whole 2-page topic to print, and I don't want the TOC to print.)

Thanks for any help.

Jan

[Peter Grainge]

I think there may be two issues here. The TOC printing is because the user has not clicked in the pane with the topic, why should they? Click in that area and then print to see what you get. Hopefully it will be the whole topic. Assuming it is, see Item 3 in the WebHelp section of Snippets​ on my site.

If it is still only the first page, albeit without the TOC, then still try the above fix. If it persists with that, see if you get the same problem in other browsers​.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring information

@petergrainge

[John_Meidl]

Thank you, Peter, for your greatly helpful website. After I posted my question on Friday, I found another thread where you had directed people to the #3 snippet regarding how to create a print button (as you mentioned in this thread also). That is EXACTLY what I needed. Great instructions! (If others do this programming per snippet #3, be sure to scroll down to get all of the code.) The print button whether I'm viewing my help from IE or Chrome works well.

[Fat_Max]

Those having print issues may find this useful:

I followed a couple of different procedures to get the print button operational in our applications Help:  P. Grainger's Snippet #3 method and also tried van Weeldon's method using the Toolbarscript.js baggage file.  Some have had trouble printing from Chrome while IE works.  In my case, I was able to print from Chrome but when clicking on the print button in IE11, nothing would happen.

It was identified that a Microsoft Update was blocking the Print feature within the application.  Our application where WebHelp resides uses the MeadCo ScriptX
ActiveX control for printing. KB4022719, KB4022722 and KB4021558 in Windows 7 and KB4022715 in Windows 10 were preventing the ScriptX from correctly printing.

To correct the printing, the identified KB update has to be removed.

According to MeadCo, Microsoft is aware of the issue and once MeadCo has additional information they will post it on their home page in “Latest News.”

[RebeccaN2017]

I have a similar question:

I would like to know if there is any possibility to select several topic from the TOC and print the selected topics? So that our customers can print only those topics they need instead of printing either the whole Webhelp (by attaching a PDF) or one page at a time.

And as we have a lot of customers we cannot provide customized printed documentation as this would be too much.

Thank you!

[Amebr]

There's no built in way in Robohelp that I know of (unless there's a new feature in RH2015 or 2017, although I doubt it).

You *might* be able to do it with Javascript, but I think you would need a programmer, and then probably post-process your output each time.

[Peter Grainge]

There's nothing new added in RoboHelp 2015 or 2017 to provide what is wanted. On any site I think I would expect to print page by page so I wonder if people would even be aware you have provided something to print a multi-selection.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring information

@petergrainge