Anyone having troubles creating PDFs?

[IrishPhil]

Hello...having trouble with both methods of outputting PDFs, both Single Source Layouts - Printed Documentation and Review - Create PDF for Review. Both outputs have their good and bad points, however I have settled on the Printed Doc as the least work to make respectable.

I'm working with RH v10 and Acrobat XI Pro.

I do have problems like blank pages, easy to delete but the page numbering is then wrong. Does anyone know how to get rid of page numbering? It happens even when I use a custom master page with no numbering.

But by far my biggest issue is with two long tables refusing to print beyond one page resulting in many of the rows being lost. I've gotten round it by using the Review PDF and pasting that in but it's time consuming and has different formatting, and of course that puts the page numbering out as well.

I think this is very poor of Adobe, I'm really sorry I started using the RH editing instead of leaving the source in FrameMaker or Word. (My main output is WebHelp). But you live and learn.

Thanks for any help, I probably won't be able to reply before Wed 27th.

[Peter Grainge]

Before blaming Adobe, let's find out what the problem is.

Tables normally work just fine. If you open the Employee Care project you will see the topics have lots of tables and they all print across pages.

How were you creating the tables that would not print to a second page? New one on me.

Can you pop one of your topics with a problem table into a new project and send it to me as instructed on the Contact page on my site?

The headers and footers are created automatically and you cannot suppress their creation. Why remove the page numbers? Surely your users want them to use from the TOC. The TOC can easily be updated after editing, just right click to the right of the TOC in Word and you will see an Update option.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[IrishPhil]

Apologies for delay in responding Peter and thanks for your help. I returned to work yesterday but unfortunately the new laptop with RoboHelp 10 (and Technical Suite) is having comms issues. Someone is coming to look at that now, meanwhile I am trying to install Tech Suite on another laptop.

This is all taking time of course. Maybe one of the topics with the problem table (there are two but others print out fine) would be of some use. As per your Contact page, I sent it with cutesendit.com

This is my first project in using RoboHelp. We have huge amounts of legacy text and I can't remember whether I imported this table or used cut-and-paste from HTML. I have looked at the HTML code of the topic but didn't see much there.

Thanks again.

[IrishPhil]

I can't believe I am alone in having troubles with PDF output from RH (v10 as it happens) so here's an update on this.

First of all, I do think that if your company produces PDFs for clients, as complementary to WebHelp, then you should use FrameMaker or Word for your source files and for editing. Then import to RH when creating WebHelp output. There are simply too many issues when creating PDFs from RH, and too much manual manoevering to get round them. I haven't seen issues with importing these files into RH in other projects.

My chief difficulties were that two tables in our English RH files refused to print beyond a page in Printed Documentation whereas in the Japanese translations that returned from our vendor, nearly all the tables went off the page horizontally, again resulting in loss of text. In addition, the PDF output had seemingly arbitrary blank pages inserted.

I got round the table issue as follows: 1. Copy a table from the WebHelp output and paste into Word, save. 2. Import to RH, creating a HTML file. 3. Open this file in a browser, copy the table, and paste into the RH topic. This worked, all other options I tried did not.

I got round the blank page and other formatting issues by outputting to Word from RH and working on the file there before outputting to PDF.

I hope others can benefit from my experience.

[Peter Grainge]

First, as I said before, let's see what the problem is before blaming anyone.

Second, these are user to user forums not directly monitored by Adobe. If you are not happy with the way the product works, you need to contact Adobe.

I have got your file but a deadline stopped me looking at it. I will take a look asap.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Peter Grainge]

The source document you sent me is stuffed full of proprietary code from Word which is known to cause issues when working with HTML. Nonetheless I imported it as sent into a clean Rh10 project and then generated a Word document. It prints the table over several pages without any problem.

I then wondered if opening the file in Word and saving it in filtered format would get rid of some of the unwanted code. It's the first time I have seen Word report it cannot open an HTML file because there are "problems with the content".

I really don't think this is a Rh problem, it's about the content you are throwing at it and this problem is not a normal one. Please create a new project and import the file you sent me, then create a printed output. Does it work in that project?

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Peter Grainge]

There may be solutions to this problem I need you to try the test above before we can start working on them.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[IrishPhil]

Peter, thanks for your time on this. I intended to reply to you today (after days of working full out on several projects) and I just got a mail from Japan detailing problems with a Japanese PDF that I created also.

I can't spend any more time on this as I have other work to do. I agree that the issues were introduced from Word and from the HTML files returned from the translators but that is not really relevant to me in ths instance. It's RoboHelp that has such difficulty in outputting them properly.

I've used RoboHelp for a year now, on two major projects. It's a powerful tool. However, if a company is producing PDFs for their clients I do not recommend outputting from RH. You yourself often recommend outputting to Word in this forum and manipulating before producing a final output.

In addition to the PDF issues, translation is a big issue for text in RH. As mentioned, sending the HTML files for translation resulted in a lot of manual corrections on my part.

In one of our projects we work in Word and import to RH for the WebHelp files. In the project I've spoken of (which uses a lot of conditional text) as we have FrameMaker, I'll be porting the RH files to Frame, making use of the conditional functionality there, importing to RH as required for WebHelp, and producing PDFs in Frame. (This should also solve the many translation issue we had with RH also).

I learned all this the hard way, and I'm using this forum to share my experience.

[Peter Grainge]

I have to make it clear for anyone else reading this thread that your experience is far from normal and I had no problem in generating a table from your file, the one that gives you a problem. For that reason, I don't think it fair to blame RoboHelp at this point.

Also the reason I advocate outputting to Word first is simply to configure page breaks and things like that. Not to do with problems like this.

Mixing Word and HTML is a bit like mixing diesel and gas / petrol. However, with the right techniques it can be made to work but it does require some investment in addressing your issues.

Come back when you are ready.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge