Webhelp topics don't print

[Sue]

When I attempt to print a webhelp topic, I get one blank page that just displays the browser header and footer and the ABC Help > About this help breadcrumb, and then nothing else, then a page with the browser header and footer AND the first expected page of help content, then another blank page with a browser header and footer, and then nothing else. The rest of it never prints.

We've duplicated this on various machines, with various topics, using different browsers (Firefox and IE). This happens regardless of the type of content - it occurs on pages that contain only simple text, and on pages with images, etc. We are all using the Flash 10.3 plugin.

Any idea what might be causing this and how I could fix it? Help!

Thanks.

[LTinker68]

Printing from WebHelp uses the print medium of your stylesheet. By default in Flare, this is also the same medium used when building print outputs like PDF. So you might have set your print styles to stylize your print outputs and those styles are affecting printing from the web. In this situation, what you should do is open the stylesheet file in the Internal Text Editor, scroll down to where it says @media print, and change it to say @media printPDF, for example, then save the changes. You then go into the print output target and point it to the printPDF medium instead of the print medium. Rebuild your WebHelp output and try printing a page and see if that fixes the issue. If it does, you can then modify styles in the print medium to stylize how the WebHelp output prints.

[Sue]

Hi Lisa, thanks for the suggestion! I tried this but it doesn't seem to make a difference. I then tried creating an entirely new medium and pointing toward that. It still doesn't print.

So to recap:

- I edited my stylesheet (called WebHelpStyle.css) in the internal text editor and changed the @media property from @media print to @media printPDF (a new medium for me).
- I opened my WebHelp target, opened the Advanced tab, and selected the Stylesheet medium of printPDF
- I rebuilt my help output and viewed it
- Printed a page

I got the same result. Am I doing something incorrectly? I tried pointing toward the medium I usually use to build my help - non-print - and that didn't work either.

Thanks for any suggestions you can give-I appreciate it.

[lacastle]

Do you have any page-break style settings in your print medium? like always before H1?

[LTinker68]

- I opened my WebHelp target, opened the Advanced tab, and selected the Stylesheet medium of printPDF

Sorry, I probably wasn't clear. The WebHelp target still needs to point to the medium called "print". Browsers expect the medium to be called that. It's in your print target that you change the medium to printPDF.

Renaming @media print to @media printPDF will effectively delete the @media print block, so it would be the same as if you had created a stylesheet from scratch, at least as far as the print medium goes, since a brand new stylesheet doesn't contain an @media print section. Or if it does it's empty. After you set the WebHelp target back to print and rebuild, when you print a page you should be seeing the browser's standard print styles, so you shouldn't have those weird page breaks. Test that first. If the page breaks are gone (or at least appear in more appropriate locations), then you can modify the print medium in the Stylesheet Editor to specify how you want topics printed from WebHelp to look.

So...

WebHelp output, viewed in the browser --> uses styles not located inside any @media block in the stylesheet ("default" medium in Stylesheet Editor)
WebHelp output, printed from the browser --> uses styles located in the @media print block in the stylesheet ("print" medium in Stylesheet Editor)
PDF output, viewing and printing --> uses styles located in the @media printPDF block in the stylesheet ("printPDF" medium in Stylesheet Editor)

Hopefully that explains it better.

[Sue]

I just wanted to post a resolution to this thread, in case anyone ends up having this problem after me. The problem ended up being unrelated to Lisa's suggestion (although I appreciated her suggestion). The problem was they Div.Body display type on my stylesheet. It was set to inline-block and I had to change it to block. Everything then worked perfectly. Thanks to Flare tech support for finding this for me!