Dynamic Title of Document in Header

[aarondietz]

I'd like to be able to produce many different PDFs with different titles in the headings (all from a single Flare project). Example: I want to build a PDF titled "Introductory Course" and a separate PDF titled "Intermediate Course" and so on--all sharing bits and pieces of the same content within the same Flare project, and all having the title of the PDF as a heading on every Left-facing page.

I can do this in a couple less-than-ideal ways, but I'd love it if I could populate the heading in our page layout by pulling from the title we put on our cover page, or if there were another more ideal solution I haven't thought of yet.

The less-than-ideal ways include the following:
1. Create a new page layout for each document title I need to produce (not ideal because then an edit to our page layout means an edit to many page layouts).
2. Edit our title of the document on the cover page to be an h1, then have the page layout display the h1 in the header (not ideal because it would mean we'd have to shift all our headings down a level--h1's would become h2's, etc.)

[Nita Beck]

Welcome to the forums, Aaron!

I presume you have a different target for each of these PDFs, yes?

The easiest way is get different titles is to create a variable called something like "CourseTitle" and then, in each PDF target, define the title there. Then you can use that variable wherever you need it, including on the title page (an .htm) or in the page layout itself, perhaps in a decoration frame. In fact, you could have just a single "title page" topic that you use for all of the PDFs. No need to have separate ones for each; let Flare do the heavy lifting by using variables.

HTH

[aarondietz]

Nita, thanks for the welcome, and thanks for your help!

I was under the mistaken impression that I could not edit the target variables (they don't look editable, and there's an "edit" button nearby that takes you to edit the variables globally, so...). How silly of me!

I was indeed wondering why variables were not so...variable. But now I know they are! Thanks for your help! We actually had our headings set up this way, but were stuck changing the variable globally for each build of each document (annoying when we need to hand off several in one day). None of us thought to edit the variables within the target. Thank you! Our lives are better now.

[Msquared]

Hi Aaron, and welcome from the UK too.

Interestingly, one of the things I remember from my early days of learning Flare was also being confused about how to set variables, and wondering why they weren't quite so variable. It's obvious once you know how, but not so obvious when you are first trying to get your head round all the moving parts.

Keep asking the questions.