creating pdfs for complex situations

[Lance_Moore]

Hi all-

I am looking for ideas/approaches. I am making a sort of uber project, combining all three documents that customers currently have to refer to when deciding to upgrade their appliances into one project/webguide (html5, topnav), where the user can easily move across topics to get related information.

Ideally, we'd like our customers to be able to make PDFs on the fly, saying I'll take these four pages here, those four pages there, and five from the third section. Is that feature (pdf generation on the fly) in the works? Is there another approach to that general idea that I should consider?

At the moment what I can think of is to manually create a pdf target containing my best guess at the bits a user might want for each release, but every case is pretty individual. I don't know how likely it is that my best-guess target would have all of the correct information for even one user. So many people still prefer PDFs over webguides.

Lance

[doc_guy]

Lance,

Nothing like that is supported by Flare natively, and MadCap is generally not willing to comment on upcoming features until they are released.

The solution you've already thought of is probably the best way do this in Flare. I guess you could conceivably do something like create targets for every possible iteration, and then create a web script that when called by a user on the website would kick off a command line build for that specific target, and then the script would wait until the file is generated, and then move the file to a webserver, and then provide the user with a link (or automatically start the download of the file), but that is not something I've seen done. I'm just guessing that it is theoretically possible.

[Rene Severens]

Hi,

Searching for and working on the same. If ever a nice procedure can be figured out I am very interested.

A first attempt to generate a filter for the required/desired topics only to produce a PDF resulted in the need of some coding. And that is what has caused the attempt stopped at the moment.

Greetings,
Rene Severens