MadCap Software Forums

I have a print version of a manual that contains topics that can be used as online help, and some of the topics begin with a h2 heading. When these topics show up as online help, the first heading is a h2 heading. How do I make them a h1 heading? The only way I can think of is to write the heading twice, and conditionalize each one by assigning a h2 style to the heading conditionalized for print and h1 to the heading conditionalized for online. That seems clumsy. Is there a better way?

If you are not using H2 in your help output, you could change the formatting of H2 to match H1 for whatever medium or stylesheet you are using for the web output. (Of course if you're using H2 as a separate style in the help output then this won't work.) You may need to first copy the existing H2 formatting into the print medium so that it still works for print outputs (depending on how your stylesheet is set up).

The other option when single-sourcing print and help is to start all topics with H1, and then use the "Use TOC depth for heading levels" in your print output to automatically adjust that topic to an H2 depending on where it is in your print TOC.

The other option when single-sourcing print and help is to start all topics with H1, and then use the "Use TOC depth for heading levels" in your print output to automatically adjust that topic to an H2 depending on where it is in your print TOC.

We use this method and it has proved to be very flexible. It allows you to mix-and-match topics between different outputs without having to tweak heading levels based on the output being generated and you don't have to include the duplicate headings and apply conditions. This is especially nice if translating content and only sending new/modified topics to the vendor.

Thanks for the replies! I'll try the TOC depth method.

The other method won't work for the reason stated. (I.e., changing the h2 format in the online output to match the h1 format in the print output won't work because in the online output I also have h2 headings that shouldn't be tampered with.)