PDF Publisher
Publish your help pages as a single PDF file, complete with a custom title page, table of contents, PDF bookmarks, page numbering and formatting. You have the option to use your own custom HTML title page or have HelpLogic generate a generic title page.
HelpLogic's PDF Publisher is perfect for producing electronic user guides and e-books. If you need to create printed paper-based documentation, then publish your help pages as a PDF file and then print the PDF to paper.
When HelpLogic is run in Trial demo mode, the published PDF's Table of Contents is limited to 3 topics per chapter. This publishing limitation is removed when you purchase a license and register the application with your serial number.
HTML Authoring Tips for PDF Publishing
- Styles: If you want to use different styles and colors for the way text and hyperlinks display in PDF, but still retain your original styles for publishing in other help formats such as Web-based Help, then the easy solution is to link to external CSS files. In the stylesheet link meta tags, assign the media attribute to "screen" for web styles and "print" for print styles. For example, within your head tag, include:
<link media="screen" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="style_web.css">
<link media="print" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="style_print.css">
In your external CSS files, you can include your web-related styles in the "style_web.css" file (such as blue, underlined hyperlinks) and your PDF-related styles in your "style_print.css" file (such as black hyperlinks).
- Forced Page Breaks: If you want to force a page break in the middle of a topic, then add the following CSS style where you want the page break to occur. This print-related CSS code should not affect the HTML display in a web browser. This example shows the CSS style in a paragraph tag, but you could also create your own CSS class that calls this style:
<p style="page-break-before: always"></p>
- Image Placement: If an image in one of your HTML help files gets cut-off at the bottom of a PDF page (with the remainder of the image displayed at the top of the next PDF page), the easy way to fix this is to move the placement of the aligned image in your HTML source code to avoid that page break. For example, if only a little bit of the image bottom gets cut-off by the page break, then simply move the image up a few lines in your HTML code, moving it away from where that page break will occur when published to PDF.
- HTML Table & Image Widths: If your text and images run off the right edge of the PDF page, then the cause is usually due to HTML tables and/or images with set widths that are greater than the printable width of the PDF page. HTML resolution is 72 pixels per inch, so if you are printing to a PDF page size of 8.5 inches wide, but have assigned a page margin of 0.5 inch on the left and right margin, then that means your printable width is 7.5 inches. 7.5 X 72 pixels = 540 pixels. So in order to ensure that your images and text do not run off the edge of your PDF page, you need to make sure that none of your HTML tables or images have widths set at anything wider than 540 pixels. If an HTML table width needs to span the entire width of the PDF page, then it's safer to use width="100%" instead of a set pixel number.
- PDF Publisher (Mac OS X): If you find that changes made to your external CSS stylesheets are not being published to PDF, that is not a bug in HelpLogic, but a bug in Apple's WebKit framework. HelpLogic's PDF Publisher utilizes Mac OS X's built-in WebKit framework to render/parse your HTML pages. For some reason, WebKit will sometimes use an older cached version of your external CSS file instead of using the most recently updated version. The same problem occurs in Safari browser sessions. Often the only way to get WebKit to recognize/load the latest version of your external CSS file is to quit HelpLogic in order to "reset" WebKit. Safari browser users often have to quit Safari to "reset" WebKit when encountering the same kind of caching issues. Apple is aware of the issue and when they fix it in WebKit, it will automatically be fixed in Safari, HelpLogic, and any other Mac application that utilizes the WebKit framework.