Text in Page Layout Decorations

[Fiscal]

I cant seem to get the text that i enter into decoration boxes on my Page Layout to show up on my output.

This is only on the first page, as its layout is odd compared to the rest i was just going to add the text where i needed it to get my desired effect.

Thanks

[lacastle]

Maybe it has something to do with putting it in a Decoration box. Have you tried using Header or Footer and moving the box to where you want it?

[Fiscal]

Added the text into a header box and still doesn't show. I dont know if it makes a difference, but i have a decoration box at the top of the page with the specific logo for the manual, and it shows up fine.

[lacastle]

Maybe the image is so big it's covering up the rest of the page? that happens in webhelp toolbars if the images are the wrong size.

[Fiscal]

Image isn't too big, the measurement is only like 2 in. by 4 in. wide, and by the page layout, its not even a 1/4 the length of the page.

Cant be covering it up because i have text at the bottom left of the page.

[LTinker68]

Decoration frames I think end up being in a lower "layer" when the PDF is built, so if your body or html tag in the stylesheet is set to have a white background (or any other color background) then it'll cover up all the decoration frames. So if you specified a background color on the body or html tag for your online output, make sure you set the background color attribute for that tag to "none" in the print medium of the stylesheet.

I believe the frames also inherit from the base DIV tag, so make sure you didn't specify anything odd for them in the stylesheet, but if you can see your topic content and headers and footers then the DIV tag is probably fine.

[Fiscal]

I dont think i clarified the problem. Here is what my page layout looks like.

Page Layout Error.png

Everything prints out right except the decoration box on the bottom left. The top box i just used a an image box, the 2nd box down is a header box, and the 3rd box is a footer box.
The box on the bottom left is also a header box (2).
I'm guessing since there is 2 header boxes, it wont show the 2nd one's text? Thats the only explanation that i can come up with.

If i replace the bottom left Header box with a decoration box and add the text to that, i get the same results, except the arrow goes from the Top box with the image down to the bottom left one.

Hope this helps clarify the problem.

[lacastle]

by having 2 of the same types of boxes, the arrow is indicating that the second is the "overflow" box (like columns in text wrapping to the top of the next column). Is there a topic associated with this page layout? put the text you want in the topic, and then use a body box in the page layout.

[Fiscal]

That was the point of me doing it in the page layout. I didn't want to have to come up with specific styles to handle the spacing on the front page, when i can just put it where i want it in the page layout.

Dont guess this is plausible.

Thanks for all your help.

[lacastle]

the only style you would need is font/color/decoration. the body box will put the text on the page wherever you put it.

[Fiscal]

K, i see that now. Didn't before.

Thank you once again.

[Fiscal]

I'm sorry, i just dont understand the process behind page layouts evidently. Looks like i'm going to need some help understanding how this works. The following screenshot is the page layout for the front page of my manual.

Page Layout Error.png

1 Image box with 3 body frames.

What i cant grasp is how flare knows what text to place in each body frame. The following image is my front page.

front page error.png

and this is what i get when i build.

test.png

This just makes no sense. When i am editing the front page, I dont have an option to only type in the boxes that are set by the frames on the page layout. I just dont understand what goes where and why.

Someone please help, this is giving me a headache.

Sorry for being pic heavy, dont know any other way to describe my problem.

[lacastle]

you can keep the header and footer boxes on your page layout. the way my pdf manuals work is that everything stays the same all the time except for the title of the book (copyright, company name, etc.). i put the copyright and company name in header and footer boxes. i put the title in a body box, which is picking up the title text from a topic that i call "title." in that topic, i have a variable called "bookname" which links back to a variable that i created in MyVariables. instead of giving the bookname variable a permanent definition in the variables section, i modify it in the target editor/variables tab with the name of the book. i'll post some pictures below.

(by the way, it took me a long time to figure out how to get this to work exactly the way i wanted.)

[lacastle]

here are the screenshots to match my comment above

[lacastle]

last screenshot to show defining the bookname variable in the target

[lacastle]

and here's what it looks like in the pdf

[LTinker68]

What i cant grasp is how flare knows what text to place in each body frame.

The only frame type that is populated from your content topics is the body frame. All other frames (header, footer, decoration) you have to either insert the content (image, hard-coded text, color filler, etc.) or insert a variable that pulls its value from elsewhere.

If you have two body frames on a single page in a page layout, then the content from the topic will start in the first body frame then spill to the second body frame when it runs out of room in the first body frame. Note that Word output doesn't handle two body frames, so if you're single sourcing multiple types of print outputs or if your print output is to Word, then you can only have one body frame on each page of the page layout. (Assuming that restriction hasn't been changed in the last few versions of Flare.)

[ChoccieMuffin]

Ah, I think I can see what the problem might be (but I could be wrong).

By the looks of it, you are using just ONE page layout, and that page layout contains three pages, First, Left and Right.

If your title page is just a single page with a completely different look from every other page in your book, I suggest you create a new Page Layout, not just try to use a new page in the default page layout. Call it something like "front.flpgl". In that layout you can have your graphic in your Header box, your title and the other bit of text in your Body box (adjust the paragraphs with space before/after, margins, padding, that kind of thing) and whatever needs to be in the bottom left hand corner in your footer.
In the new Page Layout you should create a Normal page (or a First page, I don't think it really matters) and an Empty page, so that you can set up the book so that there's a blank page on the other side of the piece of paper when it's printed.
And don't forget to apply the Frontpage.flpgl page layout to the front page topic in your TOC.

By the way, if you're going to be including an index as well, you'll probably need a third Page Layout for your index to use.

As for why there's a difference between what's in your page layout and what you see in the XML editor in Flare, what you see in the XML editor screen is NOT necessarily what you get when you generate. it looks to me as if your editor is just using the main Body page layout. If you create a separate page layout file as suggested above, you should find that the XML editor screen looks a bit more like what you want.

Hope that helps. And do read the Flare Printed Output Guide that you can download, I did actually find the bit about page layouts quite clear.

[lacastle]

And do read the Flare Printed Output Guide that you can download, I did actually find the bit about page layouts quite clear.

Yes, the Printed Output Guide was helpful, although i had to read it a few times to find everything.

By the way, I do not use multiple page layouts in my project. i have Title , Normal, First, and Empty all in one place. The Title topic gets linked to the Title layout, the First pages of every chapter get linked to the First layout. Everything else is Normal by default. Empty pages show up on their own.

(your problem could also be that you aren't linking your first page to a Title layout. i had that issue too initially.)

[Fiscal]

Alright, i got it now.

I didn't know about setting up different chapters in the TOC, I also didn't know how to specify a page layout per topic. This is now extremely useful .

Thanks for all your help. We all learn something new everyday.

[Fiscal]

Question though, will setting the chapter breaks have any effect on my TOC that is in the PDF Viewer?

[LTinker68]

If you mean the generated TOC, then no -- setting page breaks in the TOC Editor affects the topics themselves, not the generated TOC.

[Fiscal]

Ok Great! Thanks to all for your help.