Print a Flare TOC?

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Phlawm53
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Print a Flare TOC?

Post by Phlawm53 »

Has anyone figured out how to print a Flare TOC?

I sometimes use the Flare TOC editor/creator to create an outline of a document. (No topic files yet exist.)

It would be handy if I could print the TOC so, among other things, others could review the proposed structure of a document.

At this point I resort to taking a screenshot of the TOC editor and printing that. I'd rather just print the TOC.

Any ideas?

Cheers & thanks,
Riley
SFO
Nita Beck
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Re: Print a Flare TOC?

Post by Nita Beck »

AFAIK, there isn't a way to print the TOC nice and pretty with all its nested books and topics.

These workarounds come to mind:

1. In the TOC Editor, switch to Grid View (by clicking the Tree View button on the toolbar; not terribly intuitive, but the button is a toggle whose name changes depending on which view is active). Then you can export all or some of the TOC to a CSV file. At least items will be in the right order, but the nesting isn't obvious. But you'll get to see how things are conditioned, if they are marked as new, if they have a break applied, if they have a page layout applied, and so forth.

2. Generate a report for which the only criterion is TOC - Primary Target. It's under the TOC category. I'm using Flare 9 now, so I'm not sure if this report was in earlier versions. The report will list each TOC entry and the topic it's linked to, from top to bottom, but that's it. No nesting, no conditions, etc.

3. Open the TOC in a text editor such as Notepad and print from there. You can sort of see the nesting. But there will be a lot of stuff that you (much less a reviewer) probably aren't interested in seeing.

I hope these ideas get you at partway to your goal.
Nita
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RETIRED, but still fond of all the Flare friends I've made. See you around now and then!
Phlawm53
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Re: Print a Flare TOC?

Post by Phlawm53 »

Nita:

Thanks.

Since the Flare TOC is, like all Flare files, XML based, creating a "TOC printer script" may be end up being a nifty little XSLT project...

Cheers & thanks 'gain,
RBV
Last edited by Phlawm53 on Fri Feb 01, 2019 11:02 am, edited 1 time in total.
Ted Rose
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Re: Print a Flare TOC?

Post by Ted Rose »

Dear Nita and Phlawm53,

I used another workaround, opening the Master TOC file in an XML editor (Syntext Serna Free), then printing the displayed XML file to a PDF file via Acrobat Pro.
This did NOT give a nicely-formatted output, but at least the structure of the links was maintained, and I could see what topics were books or sub-topics within books. Which was enough for my purposes.

Hope this helps.

Ted Rose
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mwmartz
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Re: Print a Flare TOC?

Post by mwmartz »

Any new information on how to print a TOC from Flare with the full structure? The workarounds are "OK," but not very elegant. I thought maybe something might have improved (fingers crossed) in this regard over the last 4.5 years.

Thanks,
Mary
Nita Beck
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Re: Print a Flare TOC?

Post by Nita Beck »

mwmartz wrote:Any new information on how to print a TOC from Flare with the full structure? The workarounds are "OK," but not very elegant. I thought maybe something might have improved (fingers crossed) in this regard over the last 4.5 years.
Alas, not that I know of...
Nita
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RETIRED, but still fond of all the Flare friends I've made. See you around now and then!
Phlawm53
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Re: Print a Flare TOC?

Post by Phlawm53 »

I began writing a Python 3 hack that was primitive but sorta` worked. But the need wasn't that great so I never got 'round to productizing it. Truth be told, I forgot I created this thread back in 2013 -- I've been using so many other tools besides Flare that I completely lost sight of the question...
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