PDF's not opening in HTML5 or Webhelp output in IE8

[Vincent_Karma]

Hello and thank you for your help. I am a new user with MadCap Flare but I am getting the hang of things rather quickly. The issue I am having is with PDF's in the HTML5 and Webhelp outputs but only in IE8; if I use Chrome, I have no issues. The issue is that I have added PDF's to my TOC and they do display in the TOC output but when they are selected, nothing happens in the content display area. Again, this is only happening in IE8 and not an issue in Chrome. Is anyone familiar with this issue? Could it be an IE issue? Would anyone know of a work-around (that doesn't include excluding IE)?

Thank you for the help!

[dorcutt]

Oh god, I just got done with wrestling with this. Took most of a day. I'm willing to bet you have the "Mark of the Web" option selected in your target, which is causing this issue.

Having the Mark of the Web is, on the whole, good. The problem is that it prohibits links to "external" files, such as your PDFs. The way I solved this was by adding the PDFs to Resources file of the project, then using a hyperlink with the "File In Project" option selected. I also messed around with relative filepaths to make sure that it lined up properly with my PDF files, but I'm not sure if that was strictly necessary or not.

Sorry I can't be more specific right now, bit of a rush. I'll check back to see if you still are having issues.

EDIT: I didn't have the files directly in my TOC, so I'm not sure if this is the exact same issue. Try using a "file in project" hyperlink. If that doesn't work, you might not be able to link to the PDF directly from the PDF with IE. That I'm not sure about.

[Vincent_Karma]

Thank you for your reply and input. At this point, I am still running tests in MadCap before the project officially starts, so what I did was create a brand new project, skin, output and TOC, regenerated the project and I got it working now. The issue I am running into now is that the PDF's are not coming up in the Search results. It seems that the output needs to be set to WebHelp Plus for this to work but I don't have that level of access at the moment. Thank you again for your help. I do really appreciate it!

[dorcutt]

Glad you were able to bypass the PDF download issue.

The way I have my PDF downloads set up is a link in the page footer, much like in the Advanced HTML5 template. There is a "more PDF downloads" page, which includes all relevant PDFs, and that comes up in my search results just fine, for what it's worth.

[Vincent_Karma]

If I'm understanding you correctly, the way you have it set up, the search result displays your "More PDF Downloads" page and not necessarily the individual PDF's? For example, if I worked for a bank and had a W-9 PDF form, there is no way to have this come up if the user searches, "W-9" but if they search for "PDF", they would see results for all the PDF's in the project?

[dorcutt]

Yes, you're understanding how my PDFs can be searched for anyway. All I can really share with you on the subject is my own experience. I don't know much about PDFs and search results specifically, other than where to find more info in the flare help.

In your example, a search for PDF would return the pages ranked highest for that keyword search. A search for W9 would return the pages ranked highest for that keyword search instead. The trick is to make sure that the searches that should take a user to a PDF download link do so. You might want to check out this page: http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... %20results. There's no way that I know of to "force" a page (or a PDF) to the top of the search results. If you are unhappy with Flare's built-in search, I know it is possible to replace this with a custom site Google search instead (https://www.google.com/cse/)

In my case, everything happened to work out pretty well without me having to do any tweaking. Hope this is at least helpful.