Not printing bottom frame content to PDF

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JRtechw
Propeller Head
Posts: 68
Joined: Thu Oct 05, 2017 8:08 pm

Not printing bottom frame content to PDF

Post by JRtechw »

Flare 2019, vanilla publishing to PDF.

We recently discovered odd behaviour in our Flare project. We have a set of page layouts that are pretty standard: Front/Left/Right/Empty pages, header frame up top, body frame in middle, and footer frame down the bottom with a table that has a copyright text snippet and a system variable for the page number.

Recently Flare stopped publishing the content in the bottom footer frame when published to PDF Target. The top border of the frame (Frame Properties > Borders) prints, but anything in the actual frame does not print at all.

I've made sure:

1. The TOC > Printed Properties points to the correct Page Layout and page type.
2. The Target > General > Page Layout points to the correct default Page Layout.
3. The frame sits entirely within the page dimensions (bog-standard A4).
4. The styles in the footer content all are set to display in the stylesheet (I shouldn't need to, but I explicitly set them all to display in the CSS).

I've tried:

1. Converting all snippet context to text in the footer frame -- no luck.
2. Inserting a decoration frame instead of a footer frame -- no luck.

Our IT has not yet upgraded us to build 7081, so I'm hoping that patch might fix or at least kickstart Flare into refreshing all its stored page layouts, though I didn't see anything like this in the release notes.

I have a vague memory of having page layout PDF dramas a while back and I deleted a bunch of stuff that Flare had cached away, but I am sure that that was to do with images in page layout headers, not footer text.

Anyone run into anything like this?
robdocsmith
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 247
Joined: Thu May 24, 2018 3:11 pm
Location: Queensland, Australia

Re: Not printing bottom frame content to PDF

Post by robdocsmith »

Hi,

I'd try continuing to try to isolate where the issue lies:
Does the footer not display on any of the pages (a left page, a right page, an empty page, a first page), or just one of the types?
If you replace the snippet with plain text in the same style, does that display?
Does a decoration frame with that same text and style display correctly?
Does applying another basic style cause it to display correctly?
There's nothing odd about the frame definitions on the pages (two footers on a page for example?)?

I've had issues where a variable or snippet was either too large for a container frame, or the style itself made it too large (too much padding/margin on the style itself or any styles that wrap around it such as body/div etc.). In which case it wasn't displayed where I thought it should in the output.

Rob
JRtechw
Propeller Head
Posts: 68
Joined: Thu Oct 05, 2017 8:08 pm

Re: Not printing bottom frame content to PDF

Post by JRtechw »

MadCap Support eventually found the answer to the problem. We have a generic class in our general CSS file called .header, which is applied to a div that contains the navigation strip. This class has a height value, which was causing the footer to not display when published to PDF.

I just set the height on .header to 0px for all PDF media and the problem was fixed.

Many thanks to support for helping to nail this one, because I was going nowhere. I'm still mystified why this would cause a problem though, unless there is some .header class being used internally when converting page layouts to PDF. Anywhere, tossing it out there in case people run into the same drama.
SandraF
Propeller Head
Posts: 11
Joined: Mon May 06, 2019 1:55 pm

Re: Not printing bottom frame content to PDF

Post by SandraF »

Hi everybody,
This problem seemed similar to mine so I am posting here. It is not quite the same, though, in that my footer text is not showing up in the editor, not just the output.

I had even and odd footers set up using variables within a table. It was working fine and looked like this (attachment, variablesfooter.png).

I thought it would make more sense in the long run to use a snippet, so I set up a snippet "FooterEven" and inserted it (attachment, snippetfooter.png).

But once I inserted the snippet into the footer, it comes out blank. The "FooterEven" code displays when editing the footer but the code doesn't even display in the full Page Layout (attachment, snippetresult.png). Of course the output is also blank. I haven't tested it in non-pdf outputs because there seemed to be no point to doing so, since the problem seems to happen in the editor.

I tried converting all the variables in the snippet to text and reinserting, and I get the same result. I looked at the code in the flpgl file and don't see anything obvious. I did look for hidden style attributes such as are described in the solution to this post, but I didn't see any (or perhaps I am not looking in the right place). Any ideas?
Thank you,
Sandy
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