PDF bookmarking different from Contents

[zipededoo]

Hi,

Hoping there is a way to do this. We'd like our PDF bookmarks in the left pane of the Acrobat viewer to have more detail than the printed Contents page.

As far as I'm aware there are two ways to set the Contents depth: Using the mc-heading-level property of the heading style, or generating contents levels from the Flare TOC. Neither of these allows us to mimic what we had in previous versions of our documentation. We prefer to only have three heading levels in our printed Contents. Otherwise it's just too unwieldy - an extra heading level pushes the Contents out to 25 pages. Our printed Contents page is just a broad strokes outline of what's in the document. However, we prefer our PDF bookmarks to be more defined, enabling online users to dive deep into the structure of the document on screen quickly and easily. Here we have at least three or four more levels of headings than in the printed Contents.

When we generated via Frame from Flare we could do this because PDF bookmarks were set when you saved the book as PDF. You could choose to include or exclude the bookmark levels you wanted and they had no effect on the printed Contents page. The only snag was that Flare, in removing all previous builds prior to building, lost all those bookmarking and output settings, so we'd have to enter them each time. Prior to using Flare we could do it with our Frame sources easily and never lost the PDF bookmarking settings.

So now we are generating from Flare straight to PDF, the output looks as good as it did with our straight from Frame production, but the bookmarking in the PDF cannot be independently controlled.

Are we missing something? If not, can we request such a feature be added into the product? It would help our users immensely and recognize that PDF output can be used in both online and printed forms with appropriate bookmark levels for each. I'm thinking it could be set with a similar property to mc-heading-level, perhaps called pdf-heading-level or similar.

Cheers,

Rob

[DurtyMat]

from what i picked up in your post, it sounds like we are having a similar issue, check the following thread:

http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... =10&t=7883

scott and i have been going back and forth for the past couple of days, bless his heart....

[zipededoo]

Similar but not related problems. You bookmarks vanished inexplicably. Our problem relates to not being able to control independently how many levels of PDF bookmarks appear in the final doc.

Rob

[booey]

This is the info from Madcap suport on the issue mentioned by Rob if it is of help to anyone:

"This appears to be caused by a number of contributing factors. The first thing to note is that Flare is based in a topic-centric workflow, and that connections between topics are generated by layout. This works superbly for online help systems, as that format dictates that there is no "one and only one flow" between topics.
When working with printed-out documentation, this normally does not cause any problems - xref links are converted to and handled by their page number and so the links are more-or-less the same.
However, with a PDF there is a small in-between; while there is one start-to-finish flow about the page, you can still retain the features of hyperlinks. In order for this to work, PDFs need a heading or bookmark to link to for context, not just a page number.
It appears that the h5 elements were linked to in the Word document, and that those links were carried over into Flare. When you set the mc-heading-level of the h5 style to "0", the links were still active and needed something to link to - therefore, the bookmarks were created to facilitate linking in the PDF.
We are currently planning to bring more control to your PDF documents, including finer control of the Bookmarks pane. Unfortunately I do not know for sure when this will be included but I do know our development team is actively involved in adding more control of the output and I will pass along this particular condition as something they should address."

[netmatt]

This was back from 2009.

Is there now a way to include or exclude the bookmark levels you want in a PDF? I would like to only show H1 and H2 levels... OR only show the bookmarks, in a similar fashion to the TOC. (which in may case does not show H3 levels)

[DurtyMat]

This was back from 2009.

Is there now a way to include or exclude the bookmark levels you want in a PDF? I would like to only show H1 and H2 levels... OR only show the bookmarks, in a similar fashion to the TOC. (which in may case does not show H3 levels)

You might be able to accomplish this by modifying the mc-heading-level property in the CSS. If you change the number from 3 (for h3s) to 0 it shouldn't display in the output. Since you are doing this for PDFs you could apply it to the print medium and your online output wouldn't be changed.