Copyright Shown When Printing Topics Only

[Guest]

Hi All,

I'm told that we used to be able to display a copyright statement only when the user would print topics using WinHelp. The copyright would not display when viewing.

I'd like to do same thing using RoboHelp HTML Help. Is there a way to do this?

So far I've explored footers and templates but to no avail. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!
Larry

[Pete_Lees]

Hi, Larry, and welcome,

See if this thread helps:

Citation question

Pete

[Guest]

Hi Pete,

Thanks for the quick response. I was hoping to be able to tell you how well it worked in my reply, but for some reason, my compiler quit working and I'm no longer able to open the .chm files.

Since this is a new problem, I'll start a new thread. I'll post here to let you know how the citation issue worked out.

Thanks again!
Larry

[Guest]

Hi Pete,

Well, it worked great.

First, on getting the compiled Help file to open up, I had to run MJs Help Diagnostics to get the DLLs registered properly. I believe the problems cropped in when I installed Flare -- our new Help tool.

Then, I was able to get the citation working properly with your excellent instructions. I placed the following in the style sheet for each topic.

@media screen
{
p.copyright { display:none; }
}
@media print
{
p.copyright { display:block; }
}

Unfortunately, the Help system currently uses a number of style sheets rather than just one, but it still only took a couple minutes to put that code in each .css file.

Then I added the following to the TrueCode of a template footer.

<p class="copyright">Copyright © 2008 Scantron Corporation. All rights reserved. Use permitted only under license. No part of the Help may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission from Scantron Corporation. www.scantron.com

I was able to apply this to all 1700 help topics in one fell swoop. That saved me a lot of work. At first there was a style sheet associated with the template file. This switched each topic's style sheet to the template's when I applied the template to some sample topics. So I removed the .css file association with the template, and then it worked like a charm.

Thanks again for the insight. I really didn't think that I had a chance to provide that functionality when QA requested it.

Larry

[Peter Grainge]

Larry

I am doing some testing on Pete's method as it has more uses than just the one described here.

Two things I have found are:

1] Method One does not work in RH. The editor does not understand @ media.

2] Method Two does, as you say, work but you might want to test what happens to your CSS if you edit in RH.

[Guest]

Hi Peter,

I'm not sure I'm following you. Should I try editing a topic, the footer template, or the .css file. Which of those causes problems, and what does it do? I haven't noticed any problems yet.

Thanks for the tip,
Larry

[Peter Grainge]

All I was trying to get at is if you used Method Two, I found that if I subsequently edited the CSS file using the RH style sheet editor, it overwrote these changes. As a result any subsequent generation of the help will not have the @media screen and @media print content lines so the copyright well either be in both outputs or none.

Just edit the CSS file within RH and see if the copyright statement still works correctly.

[Guest]

Hi Peter,

Thanks. Got it. I will write up a procedure for my boss and I referencing this issue so that we know how to correct it. I rarely, if ever, edit the .css files, so I don't think that it will be that much of a problem. But it is very important to know about the issue.

Thanks again!
Larry

[Peter Grainge]

For the purposes of what you are doing, I think it would be easiest to just add the extra lines to the CSS when you generate a new output. I'll explain all when I add this to Snippets on my site over the next few weeks.