Creating Docs to Print on the Fly from Online Help

[ktbCA57]

Hi,

I'm not sure that there is an obvious solution to this.. if so, I apologize. On the flip side, I don't know if this is even possible. So here's the puzzle for me.

In our help, our trainers want the users to be able to click on an icon for each of the following to access associated "documentation":

quick reference guide (an abbreviated version of the steps provided in help)
detailed document about the document at hand (this would have a lot more detail than the help)
the actual full set of steps shown in the help (so this would be somewhere between the QR guide and the detailed doc and would print out exactly what the help topic shows - even the information in dropdowns and togglers

I know I can set up single source for each of those items, but in my mind, the only way to single source and that would allow users to access the various formats would be to create a target for each. That's not really "on the fly" in the sense that they want the user to click on an icon and just open the document.

Right now I have demo documents to show how each of these would appear for a user. I can link each one to an icon available in the help - HOWEVER, I'm not sure there is an efficient way to create these via single sourcing...

Anyone have an idea? is there an obvious method I'm just simply missing?

THANKS!

[dorcutt]

Wow, that's quite a challenge. I'll give a shot in broad strokes. Maybe you could use three different PDF targets to build 3 different PDFs (QR, Help, and Detail). Then, using some vague Javascript magic, split the generated PDFs so that the content for each topic ends up in its own PDF file, which you can then merrily link to. To generate it "on the fly", you would just regenerate (and re-split) the PDF versions each time you released a new web-help version. There's a discussion on splitting PDFs using javascript here that seems promising: https://forums.adobe.com/message/1100562#1100562.

For the content itself, your best bet would probably be to try to condition each topic so that it has all content for the three versions (QR, Help, and Detail). Tag the "extra" content to be excluded when building a more concise version, and condition in some text to help round out the edges where needed.

But, yeah, that's super-tricky, even assuming you manage to figure out how to split the three PDFs like you need to. Good luck; that's quite a requirement. I hope someone has a better idea than this, but it's all I can think of.

EDIT: Instead of JavaScript to split the PDFs, maybe try to take advantage of the "Target > Advanced > Multi-Document Native XPS/PDF Output" feature to generate the small PDFs that you need directly? I just learned about it from another post in this forums. No idea how well it actually works, but it would theoretically do the job.

[ktbCA57]

Wow! Thanks Dan, I am going to check out your second idea re: multi docs!

THANKS!

(PS - I do feel better that it wasn't an obvious answer I should have figured out!)