Notwithstanding the trend to online information, many users still require printed documentation. A major change introduced in Adobe RoboHelp 11 was the ability to include your own headers and footers in the printed outputs. You can define which sections have headers and footers. Each section can be different and you can customize the formatting.
Let's consider a project (Employee Care 3, not Travel the Whirls) where whilst the online help is for the US audience, printed documentation is required for the UK and Canadian users as well as the US users.
By applying build tags to content, different text will be entered for each of the three countries. When generating any output, the build expression will define what text is included and what is excluded. See the text options in this first image and see the build expression in the second image.
Since Adobe RoboHelp 11 you can generate multiple documents to the same folder provided, of course, that they have different file names. Also any links you have in your topics to popups will appear in your printed documentation, provided the target topic is in the printed document.
Note how much easier it is to select the build expression. In older versions you would have seen the expression and had to work out what would get included. The name makes it obvious.
Adding your own headers and footers can now be achieved using Master Pages that you set up for the purpose. You can use existing Master Pages but it is likely they will not quite meet your requirements.
You create a Master Page that has the headers and footers that you want. The Master Page Editor has some icons to add pre-configured options such as page numbers and chapter names. You can click Insert > Fields to add other field level information such as the project title and / or date. You can apply formatting to any part of the header and footer. See Master Page Enhancements.
In the Header / Footer dropdown shown above, you can choose whichever Master Page you want. By default that will be applied to every page in your printed document.
You may want to have different headers and footer in different sections or you may want to only have headers and footers in the content section, with nothing on the title page, the table of contents and suchlike. Click the Multiple Header/Footer button to access the dialog below where you can define your options.
In this project the Master Pages for use with the Printed Documentation Layouts have been set up with different options. Note how the US Master Pages include different odd and even pages so that the image is always on the outside when printing double sided.
Other Topics are topics added in the Section Layout as described below.
Word Documents refers to any Word documents that you add in the Section Layout.
The Advanced button allows you to set a few more options.
When you first set up the content for your printed document, you will see the Table of Contents you selected in both panes below and the books will have the turquoise highlighting. In the Chapter Layout pane you can change the order and you can delete topics if required. When you delete topics, the turquoise highlighting will be removed to show that not all its topics will be in the printed document.
Any changes you make later to the Table of Contents selected in the General Settings will be made to the pane on the left. Note however that the Chapter Layout will not reflect those changes. That is deliberate as you may not want the printed document to include everything that is in the Table of Contents.
The quick way to keep the two panes in sync is to click the left facing double chevron and then click the right facing double chevron.
The TOC dropdown also allows you to select topics not in the Table of Contents. If you add them here, they will have the same headers and footers as other topics in the Chapter Layout.
This page shows the default structure of your printed document. You can rearrange the order and remove sections as well as adding other Word documents into the layout.
You can also add topics to the section. You might want to do this to add a topic right at the end of the document about how to contact your organization, rather than it being part of the Chapter Layout.
The default title page can be deleted and you can substitute a cover page that you have created in Word or Adobe RoboHelp for the purpose. That's especially useful if you have to apply a corporate design. See the Printed Documentation US Century Gothic layout which uses a different cover page and a different Word template.
If you do design your own cover page in Word and you are going to apply a Word template to the output (as described below in Appearance Settings), it works best if both have been created from the same Word template. If they are not from the same template, then do at least make sure the two have the same settings for Word's Normal style. Otherwise you may get some additional line spacing on the cover that needs to be removed.
In this sample project there are cover pages for both Letter Size paper and A4 with different fonts and each of these can be mapped to a matched Style Mapping template. Try creating different documents with different cover pages and templates. The necessary files are in the root of the project. They have also been copied to the Assets folder and you can import them into your own project if they suit your needs.
The final page before you generate your document defines the appearance settings.
The options are to choose a Microsoft Word Template or a CSS Stylesheet. Neither one is better than the other, it is dependent on various factors.
You may already have a corporate Word template that you are required to use.
You may already want the same styles as in your project but with a green theme rather than a blue theme. It might be easier to create that by tweaking your CSS.
In this example, the mapping is to a Microsoft Word template to show how tables and multi-level list styles can be mapped using a Microsoft Word template.
If you want to design your own cover pages, you need to set the paper size, margins and so one to the same settings as the Adobe RoboHelp Style Mapping templates. In the Assets folder, you will find two blank templates, one set to Letter Size and US English and one set to A4 and UK English.
You may want to break topics at various points in Word. Set up the customization below with your preferred keyboard sequence. CTRL + Q is useful as you can thumb CTRL and finger Q easily while you scroll through. Click anywhere in the paragraph you want to start on the next page and use the command. It also works nicely in the first paragraph in the first column of a table to split it at that point.
