Customer wants to print topics with drop-downs

[twmarcb]

Is there a way to setup my drop-downs so that customers can have them print expanded by default?

[LTinker68]

I thought it did that by default? Check the target or the skin (I don't have Flare open at the moment) -- I believe one of those screens has options where you can specify how interactive features are to be treated in print output.

I just noticed what forum I'm in. Do you mean you want the drop-down effect expanded when they print from the .chm file? Or are you talking about print output (Word or Framemaker)?

[lacastle]

Yeah, I was going to say that expanding all the drop-downs can be done automatically in the print output target, but I think the question is about printing a .chm page. I don't use .chm, so i don't know if that's possible.

[twmarcb]

Yes, the customers want to be able to print individual Help topics with the drop-down text expanded by default.

[LTinker68]

Hmmm. I just started Flare and the options I referred to are in the print output Target Editor. However, those are for actual print output (Word/Framemaker/PDF), and I think that conversion is done as part of the build process. In order for it to print correctly from the .chm file, the effect would have to be specified in the print media section of the stylesheet, and there's not a corresponding style that tells it to expand the text before it prints. I know that if you click on a toggler in WebHelp output and then print the page then it'll print the text in the toggler. If you click on the expanding text and then click the print button, does it work? Not that you would want your users to have to do that if they didn't have to, but I can't think of any way to get it to expand the text automatically when printing the topic from the .chm output.

[twmarcb]

What is happening is a customer is printing the whole .CHM file from the top node and all the text within the drop down is left out of the printing. We have had several customer calls on this in the past couple of weeks and if it is possible I would like at least like to know that it is something I can configure in Flare for the next release of our product.

Any help is appreciated.

[lacastle]

Can you create a Print version of the help and link to it so the customer would just have to open that?

I know you can create custom toolbar buttons to link to a printed out in WebHelp, but I'm not sure about .chm.
http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... ersion+pdf

[Pete Lees]

Hi,

It's possible to achieve what you want by using JavaScript to expand all the drop-down sections when the user elects to print. I'm afraid I've no idea how easy this is to implement with Flare but, for what it's worth, the script look roughly like this:

Code: Select all

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--

// Invoke the showEm function when the user elects to print...

window.onbeforeprint = showEm;

// ... and then invoke the hideEm function when printing has completed.

window.onafterprint = hideEm;

function showEm() {

// Script to build an array of all the drop-down sections and expand them.

}

function hideEm() {

// Script to collapse the drop-down sections.

}

//-->
</script>

You'd add this script to a global JavaScript (.js) file and attach it to all your topics.

The following article may give you some ideas, although it's written from a RoboHelp perspective.

http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/ ... owhide.htm

Pete