MadCap Software Forums

I want to place all my Appendixes into a 'book' that will look nicer in the HTML documentation.

Is it 'bad' to create a book that remains unlinked? I do not want to link the book title to any particular Appendix.
When I publish, it works as I expected in HTML mode but there is a problem
When I publish as PDF Medium, the custom heading, Appendix Style vanishes. It is almost as it is converted into an H4 heading and all the appendixes are published without page breaks and without the preceding text, "Appendix x - ".

This is my Appendix style: So, what is happening when I place the appendixes inside a book?

It depends on what functionality you want.

If you are using breadcrumbs in your web-based output and you want people to be able to link to the item in the hierarchy of the breadcrumbs, yes, you will need a topic there. Breadcrumbs that point to empty books aren't links.

If you aren't using breadcrumbs, then it is up to your preference. In a printed book, I typically consider the book-level topic in the TOC to be the first topic for a new chapter. If I don't have any useful content to go there, I usually use some boilerplate text like:

This chapter discusses <whatever>. This chapter covers the following topics:

<insert mini-toc proxy>

That way when a user gets to the chapter, they see a list of topics in the chapter.

Now I can use the bookmarks with links, and the page that people land on is actually useful. On the new chapter page in PDF output, users see a chapter-level TOC of content. This is especially helpful for long chapters/manuals.

If I'm also producing web output, I'll use the word "section" rather than "chapter." I actually include both, but mark them with conditions, so chapter appears in print, and section appears in online outputs. Like this:

This <print only condition>chapter</print><online only condition>section</online> covers the following topics:

Just one thing to note is if you create an unlinked TOC book the headings below may appear twice (for online output). This is a bug in 9.1.2 (#36867) found by Tech Support when I contacted them about the issue. To avoid this, you need to link the book to the topic. I'm not sure if this has been fixed for V10 as I haven't tried it again, but I haven't been notified of the fix for it. But yes, if this happens for you, try linking the topic.

If you are using unlinked books with PDF output, you can Inject headings for unlinked books in TOC on the Advanced tab of the PDF target options. Does that work?

Going back to your original question, I suppose another option would be to include both structures in your TOC, but mark the one group with the Print Only condition, and mark the other with the Screen Only condition.

Then when you generate screen output, your appendicies will all be in the folder, but in the printed targets, they will all be at the root folder.

The more I think about what you have created, the more I think the issue is in the target file itself. I think you must have an option checked in the PDF target that adjusts the heading level of topics based on where they are in the TOC hierarchy. But putting the appendicies in twice and applying conditions on the TOC items in the TOC would easily solve that problem for you.

I currently have linked book topics for Print only, and do it differently from Paul's method of putting a mini-TOC-proxy in the Web version of the book topic (which I like, and may well use one day if I ever get my task list down to single figures). I'm not claiming my way is best, just that it works.

I didn't want Book topics to be linked to any of my web topics - because I had structured my content so that they were always empty apart from the header text. This applied to every book topic in single-sourced PDF/WebHelp content, so I really didn't want to maintain two TOCS, one for each target, and keep them in step.

This means that when you click on the book topic in the WebHelp it doesn't go to any page but just expands/collapses. As Paul says, it does mean breadcrumbs don't work as there is nothing to link to. In my case, I didn't see that was a problem, as my help isn't ginormous.

This is how I did it. In my single-sourced TOC, I linked the book entry to my Print-only header topic (except for one book that is on-line only, and looks exactly like yours with a missing link). Then, in Contents Explorer, I set the Print-Only condition on each header topic file that I didn't want in the WebHelp. You can't do this on a book in the TOC, as that would condition out the book and all the topics in it, which isn't what you want.

That's all good, except there is a bug, although you won't notice it until Flare 10. When Flare builds a target that uses a TOC with linked topics that aren't present for all outputs, it needs the linked topics to be present, even for the targets that don't use them, or the build will report errors. Under normal circumstances, the topics will be present - that's the whole reason you had to condition them out for the targets that didn't need them. But if you use the new Export Target feature in Flare 10, Flare is clever enough to not export these linked print-only topics, but not clever enough to build the target without them, because the reference to them in the TOC is unconditional, even though they aren't needed eventually. Bug duly raised by the bug queen.

sdcinvan wrote:When I publish as PDF Medium, the custom heading, Appendix Style vanishes. It is almost as it is converted into an H4 heading and all the appendixes are published without page breaks and without the preceding text, "Appendix x - ".

Are you not using Use TOC depth for heading levels in the target? This will modify the heading styles used in the appendix topics, according to the mc-heading-level settings.

See: http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... nt_TOC.htm

Dave Lee wrote:

sdcinvan wrote:When I publish as PDF Medium, the custom heading, Appendix Style vanishes. It is almost as it is converted into an H4 heading and all the appendixes are published without page breaks and without the preceding text, "Appendix x - ".

Are you not using Use TOC depth for heading levels in the target? This will modify the heading styles used in the appendix topics, according to the mc-heading-level settings.

See: http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... nt_TOC.htm

I should be... that was a particularly strange day for me. I'll have to look at this a bit later.

sdcinvan wrote:

Dave Lee wrote:

sdcinvan wrote:When I publish as PDF Medium, the custom heading, Appendix Style vanishes. It is almost as it is converted into an H4 heading and all the appendixes are published without page breaks and without the preceding text, "Appendix x - ".

Are you not using Use TOC depth for heading levels in the target? This will modify the heading styles used in the appendix topics, according to the mc-heading-level settings.

See: http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... nt_TOC.htm

I should be... that was a particularly strange day for me. I'll have to look at this a bit later.

If you are, and you are using Flare's defaults for mc-heading-level, then h1 would become h2, so h1.Title_Appendix is now h2.Title_Appendix - hence why it's not styled as expected.

Perhaps try a generic class .Title_Appendix (without h1), but a lot depends on how you want your TOC and headings to be set up.