PDF Output - SLOW

[rmdavidson]

Does it tend to take several times longer to generate PDF Output than WebHelp? I'm trying to setup a PDF output for use when someone wants to send a topic from our Help to someone who can't access our help (password protected WebHelp & built into software). When I try View PDF Flare goes until it stops showing errors for performance reasons then the top progress bar gets about half way through then stops and the bottom bar gets half way through then goes blank then eventually comes back further along than the top bar. I am trying to include only a couple of topics out of a 1,700+ page help doc in this PDF so it stops showing the errors as it seems to mostly be a list of all the files being excluded from the PDF. Should it take about half an hour to make this PDF?

Thanks,

Robin
Flare 7.2

[Nita Beck]

Might anything in this topic point to a solution?
http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... 10&t=12721

[rmdavidson]

Nita,

I didn't see that one in my search results, thanks! However, I don't have any Captivate Files and no overly long tables (200 rows & only a few pages long). This is my first time using a PDF output with Flare as well as our main output is WebHelp and a CHM. I'm not aware of any scans being done on the Output folder. When the output finally is done it has almost every topic in the project instead of just the ones with the Condition tag I said to include as well. I'm getting about 1,700 pages instead of about 6 pages.

Robin

[whunter]

Normally, in my experience, PDF output is much much faster than my WebHelp output. But this makes sense as my PDFs generally have fewer topics than my help.

One thing stood out for me from your post:

When the output finally is done it has almost every topic in the project instead of just the ones with the Condition tag I said to include as well.

Include alone won't work in this situation...that will cause it to include everything you flagged with Include as well as everything else that wasn't excluded. What you need to do is Exclude. However, you probably don't even need to do that. You say you are trying to generate a PDF of about 6 pages out of 1,700 total pages. I'm guessing you are using the same TOC that you use for the help. In this case it would be easier to create a new TOC with just those 6 topics (or however many topics are generating those 6 pages you want) and use that TOC for the PDF target, rather than try to use the same TOC with conditions. For PDF output, it will only include what is in the TOC, so if your TOC just has 6 topics, that's all you will get -- you won't need to worry about conditions.

[Nita Beck]

Yep, that's what I was going to suggest. Make a new TOC with the topics you want in the PDF.

BTW, a lot of us tend not to search right within the forums, the search being so poor. I use Google. I searched for "MadCap forums PDF build slow" and got that hit.