Automatic PDF Document Properties?

[wabernat]

Greetings all. First ever post. Be gentle.

I am a newcomer to Flare, but am hoping to bring new tricks to the template I'm working with. When I used FrameMaker, I concocted a pretty slick trick that eliminated the need to populate the PDF Document Properties fields manually. In Frame, I used a PDFMark script in a PostScript window embedded on the title page. This PostScript window contained variables that automagically populated the Document Title and Author fields, set the initial view to Panel and Bookmarks, and the populated the Title bar with the Document Title. Thanks to conditional text, I could populate the title bar of the output file, for example, to "SmartCo Awesome Product User Manual 4.0 DRAFT 2" simply by setting the variables (once) for product name, doc type, rev number, and turning on the Draft text condition.

I have tried editing the .fltar xml by transplanting variables from elsewhere in the document, but either this is not allowed or I suck at manually editing XML.

I would like to know the following.
1) is there any way to do this in Flare (in other words, set the fltar file to accept variables, rather than being required to manually enter the PDF output parameters as text)?
2) Does Flare play nice with embedded PostScript or PDFMark codes?

Thanks very much for your sage counsel.

--William

[ToddPh]

Welcome to the forum!

You can pre-populate those PDF properties by editing the PDF target. Check out the PDF properties tab in the target. You can set them once and have them applied to the output whenever you build.

[doc_guy]

There is not an automatic way to do this, unfortunately. You can't use variables from the Flare project in the target editor, though that sounds like a really cool feature request.

Basically, when you create the target, you manually enter the PDF document parameters in the target file itself. You would need to do this for each target manually, but you have to create a new target for every output you create anyway, so it shouldn't be too troublesome to do this when you create the target file.

[wabernat]

Thanks for the replies.

Todd: I think you miss my point. I want to have a template in which I never have to set the PDF properties manually, because those properties are populated when I set the variables (I want to title the book once, when I set the variables. I don't want to have to set the variables, then set the PDF properties).

I was able to do this fine in FrameMaker 7.1, back in 2008. If Flare is so gosh-darned clever, I should be able to do this in Flare as easily as I can do it in Frame.

Paul: How does one go about submitting a feature request? I want to be able to put variables where machines (not just humans) can read them. I could work with this as a PostScript code window, or as variables embedded in the .fltar file.

I am willing to share my Frame kludge with the Flare developers if they are interested.

--William

[mlaird]

I also think this would be a useful feature, and encourage you to submit it as a feature request.

Here's the page where you can do that:

https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback ... quest.aspx

[wabernat]

Done!

--W

[doc_guy]

And remember, the more people that request features, the more consideration is given to those features by the dev team, so anybody who likes this idea should ALSO submit a feature request.