RH HTML 11 - how to set page margins for PDFs (printed documentation)?

[m0jk]

Hi,

I've got another problem with RH 11. We're trying to customize the printed documentation output for PDFs to match our styling conventions. We're not able to find any way to change the page margins in the PDFs that are generated.

We tried to change margins in the Page Setup window for individual topics (both in the Design Mode and the HTML mode; BTW the window with settings looks different when opened while in the Design Mode and in the HTML mode), we played around with the Master Page, we went through all the possible settings in the wizard for generating the Printed Documentation, we looked everywhere to no avail. We tried to "google it out" but we didn't find anything on this topic. Does anyone know how to change such basic settings?

I've been using RH for two months and already got frustrated several times. Before, I used Help and Manual almost 3 years and things like that were so simple to achieve. Please help.

[Amebr]

I think you might need to use a Word template and set the page margins there (You'll have to configure your styles there too, but if you already have a corporate Word template, you should be able to modify a copy). You can still output straight to PDF.

[m0jk]

Thank you for the answer. It looks like we're doomed to use MS Word Our goal was to get rid of Word completely and create all our docs in RH. It may be harder than I thought.

[m0jk]

I've talked to the support guys. I was told that the default margins cannot be changed for PDFs. I'm more than amazed that an application from Adobe doesn't offer such basic settings. The only useful thing I learnt is that the default margins are 1 inch.

[Captiv8r]

Sounds like you may be a fairly new user to RoboHelp. It's been around for more than 20 years now. Adobe has only owned it since 2007. Sure, Adobe is big on PDF, but maybe it will help to understand that RoboHelp doesn't have those "Adobe Roots". That's why we still see it first generating a Word document, then the PDF from the Word document.

Perhaps someday it will reach the point where it generates a PDF directly. If it reaches that point, you will then likely see the things you want. Then again, I do struggle to see why so many folks are fixated on providing PDF content from RoboHelp. It's a tool for actual help systems and those are so much better than PDF will ever be.

Cheers... Rick

[Peter Grainge]

My experience of creating any PDF direct from an HTML file is that you don't get all the page breaks neatly where you want them. Either that or images are divorced from text you want associated.

By sending to Word first you can fix that and even documents several hundred pages long can be done quickly. Typically a few minutes and no more than ten or so for a few hundred.

I worked on Help and Manual for one project we inherited and it does have some good points. It also had ones I could not live with and I had to convert it to Rh.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[m0jk]

Currently, we use MS Word for our PDFs and we want to have just one tool, namely RH, to produce all our documentation. Every app has its good and bad sides, I'm not trying to convince anyone to use any particular software. The only thing I'm trying to say is that generating nice WebHelp and PDFs was possible using Help and Manual (even in terms of page breaks and images sticking to text) and achieving the same goal with RH is a struggle or even impossible. Thanks for all the comments. Maybe we can learn to live with the way the things are

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

High quality PDFs was the main reasoning behind the Tech Comm Suite rationale of authoring in FM (to produce PDFs directly) and then using RH to generate the help output flavours. Now that FM has sucked up a lot of the RH help generating features, a number of people just starting using FM12 aren’t needing RH at all. (I still hold that you get better control over the help generating process if you use TCS)

[m0jk]

We're not really fixated on providing PDF, it's what our customers need and since RH claims to provide single sourcing including the PDF format I expect it to really support it. I know there are better formats, but for the time being it doesn't solve our problem.