Title page not appearing in Word output

[MaggieA4]

So my company still needs me to generate manuals in Word format for the time being (this annoys me). Everything generates fine, except my title page. I've added it to the target, TOC, linked it, and did all the things to make it appear in a PDF, but it will not generate. Just a blank page before the TOC with TOC headers and footers. I've done a chapter break for it, too and all that.

Any tips?

**Correction**-- the title page is appearing, but only the text is there. The text is white: it's supposed to have a blue background and an image near the top. Those aren't appearing.

[kwag_myers]

Did you put the background and image in the topic (.htm) file or PageLayout? I'm pretty sure you must put it in the PageLayout. Looking at some of my Print projects, that's the way I've done it.

[Nita Beck]

If you've used image frames and/or decoration frames on the title page layout, you're out of luck if you're outputting to Word. Flare's Word (and FrameMaker) output does not support image frames or decoration frames. I found notes stating this in this topic in the Flare 10 Help system: http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... ayouts.htm.

[kwag_myers]

They do work in PDF (which is what all my print stuff is), however. I wonder if PDF > Word using Adobe Acrobat would work. It sounds like it would be a worthy investment if you don't have Acrobat.

[MaggieA4]

I ended up doing the PDF > Word with Acrobat for the title page so that I could edit it. Seems to be the way things will be until we go to strictly PDF targets.

Thanks for the help, everyone!

[oceanclub]

If you've used image frames and/or decoration frames on the title page layout, you're out of luck if you're outputting to Word. Flare's Word (and FrameMaker) output does not support image frames or decoration frames. I found notes stating this in this topic in the Flare 10 Help system: http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... ayouts.htm.

Hi there,

Currently we only output to PDF but in future Word will also be a target. Are there any plans to support image/decoration frames in Word for the next release? If not, what method should I use instead of these to have images on a title page?

P.

[dorcutt]

So, I currently generate Word and PDF output simultaneously, mostly for document review reasons. It's actually not all that much of a pain in the butt if you set things up properly.

In short, the best way that I found to handle Word's limitations with Page Layouts is to use Master Pages for your Word output, and bypass Page Layouts entirely. You can set up your TOC (admittedly with a good bit of trial and error) so that both the Word and PDF outputs can use the same TOC, and the Word output will be generated using Master Pages and the PDF output will be generated using Page Layouts as usual. Just use Section Breaks as well as the Page/Chapter breaks in the TOCs. I believe it is also important to leave the "Master Page Layout" property of your Word target as default.

Essentially, this allows you to do whatever you want with your PDF and Word layouts, since they do not interact with one another at all.

One of these days, I'll make an official Word output guide with much of my hard-earned Word output experience. In the meantime, I did a large writeup here that has most of the good stuff in it.