Page Layout Problems

[kmabry]

Hello,

I'm a new Flare user and am having a problem with page layouts for printed PDF output. I can't get the page layouts to function the way that I want. I have three page layouts:

1. Title Page - includes title page, blank pages, front matter
2. Body - includes headers, footers with copyright info and page numbers
3. TOC - Roman numeral page numbers with a blank page afterwards

The Body and TOC page layouts are working great. I'm mainly having problems with the Title Page layout. Here's how I have it set up:
- Title: Document title, company logo, footer, address
- Empty
- Normal - will contain front matter like copyright, legal jargon
- Empty
- Normal - will contain more front matter
- Empty

Settings for TOC output (Right click Title Page link > Printed Output tab):
Break type: Chapter Break
Page Layout: /TitlePage
Page Type: Continue L/R
Auto-end on 'left' page: Disabled

The page layout dropdown menu item on the actual Title Page.htm file is set to Title Page>Title.

Result: Only the title page shows up, but none of the body content is present. The Empty pages and Normal pages don't show up at all.

What am I doing wrong?

[LTinker68]

You can't have multiple empty pages in a page layout. Well, apparently you can have multiple empty pages in the page layout, but that's not how it works in the results, because empty pages only work at the end of a "chapter", not the middle of a chapter, so you'd only need one empty page in the actual page layout.

I think the only way you can get what you want is to fake the empty page in the middle. To do that, create a paragraph class called p.pgBreakBefore, and set the page-break-before attribute to always. Then in your topic, where you want the empty page to be, you insert a paragraph with a non-breaking space and apply the pgBreakBefore class to that paragraph. You apply the same class to the following tag, which will force it to yet another page, resulting in that empty paragraph being on a page all by itself. So the topic code would look something like...

Code: Select all

<p class="title">Title text</p>
<p class="pgBreakBefore"> </p>                       --> goes to the next page with no other content on it
<p class="pgBreakBefore">Front matter content 1</p>       --> starts content on the next page
<p class="pgBreakBefore"> </p>                       --> goes to the next page with no other content on it
<p class="pgBreakBefore">Front matter content 2a</p>      --> starts content on the next page
<p>Front matter content 2b</p>

I would also change it from Continue L/R to Normal; you're not using left and right pages in the page layout, you're using normal pages, so l/r gets you nothing.

All the above is assuming your title page content and front page matter are in the same topic. If they're in separate topics and you're not seeing the Normal pages, then you probably set a chapter break on both topics instead of just on the title page topic.

[kmabry]

Thanks! That solved my problem. I think most of the issue stemmed from me being a new user and just not understanding how page layouts are supposed to work. Everything is working great now.