MadCap Software Forums

I'm new, so please bare with me. (Don't know if it matters, but I use Flare on a computer with no Internet access and so far 'Help' within the program has been inaccessible, Win7 64 bit.)

I have a topic I'm working on and I need to switch to a different page layout. Page one is a regular 8-1/2 x 11, portrait page, pages two thru ten need to be portrait pages with two columns on them, pages eleven thru fifteen are back to the regular portrait page type, then pages sixteen thru twenty need to be 8-1/2 x 11 landscape. I'm pretty sure I need to use page breaks, but I'm not sure how to use them, every time I put in a page break, then select a different page layout, everything changes, so i know I"m doing something wrong.

Do they go at the end of page one?
Or the beginning of page two?

And then when do I switch back or to another page layout?

Do I need to check anything with my styles?

Hi - Just a quick note to say that you can download all the Flare user docs as PDFs from this url:

http://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare201 ... -Flare.htm

Copy them to your Flare workstation and you'll have offline access to help docs.

To start you in the right direction: you will want to identify the page layout to use in the properties of items in your TOC.
On the printed output tab you choose a chapter or page layout break type and which page layout and page type within that layout to use from that point onwards. Do that again on another TOC item if you later want to revert to the original layout.

I need to change page layouts WITHIN a topic, not just an entire topic. These changes sometime take place within the same heading of a topic as well. I need to be able to change individual page layouts.

BParker wrote:I need to change page layouts WITHIN a topic, not just an entire topic. These changes sometime take place within the same heading of a topic as well. I need to be able to change individual page layouts.

I regret to say that Flare isn't designed to do that. A page layout is always associated with an entire topic (by way of its associated TOC item).

BParker wrote:I need to change page layouts WITHIN a topic, not just an entire topic. These changes sometime take place within the same heading of a topic as well. I need to be able to change individual page layouts.

You may need to break this longer topic into several smaller ones and include the smaller topics in the TOC so you can apply page breaks. You CAN have a topic that doesn't start with a heading so that should work, but you might find you want to restructure your content to take into account the topic-based way Flare puts its outputs together.