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Generate Contents list with no content?

Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2021 8:18 am
by richt
I've been posed an interesting challenge by our legal team.

My Flare project includes a separate topic file for each product, with the name as an <h1> and all the descriptions and details underneath. We generate a large PDF of all the information on a monthly as a PDF.

Legal have now asked for a document that shows the Contents page and nothing else, so that they can use it as an Approved List of Products. The brute-force way of doing this is to generate the full PDF and then cut the redundant pages off in Acrobat, but that seems both mindless and ugly (since the Contents page still shows the page number).

Any ideas?

Re: Generate Contents list with no content?

Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2021 2:03 pm
by doloremipsum
Ooh, interesting question. I *think* you might actually be able to get away with this. Create a medium in your stylesheet that marks all styles in the project (paragraphs, headings, etc) as display: none. It will also have to mark the p.TOC1 etc styles (as well as any other styles that you actually want to see list headers/footers) as display: block. Alternatively, maybe you could just hide the body style, then give the TOC topic a body style class that isn't hidden.

In theory, Flare should hide the headings and text, but still be able to use them for the TOC. I haven't tried this, so maybe give it a go and report back?

Re: Generate Contents list with no content?

Posted: Tue May 04, 2021 1:39 am
by richt
Thanks for this - it's given me a new avenue to pursue!

I added a new medium and set a few items (h3, p, table) etc as display: none, and that's taken an 80+ page document down to 6, so there's definitely a way forward from here. Applying the same style to the body didn't do anything, but I doubt that brute force approach would have worked anyway.