Printing from CHM gives only breadcrumbs

[Wayne Newberry]

I'm running Flare 4.2.0 and my output format is CHM. I have breadcrumbs included and they are working just fine.

A user says that if he selects a book in the TOC, right-clicks and selects print, then chooses "Print the selected heading and all subtopics" he gets a list of breadcrumbs printed, one breadcrumb for each topic in the book, but no topic information is printed.

Printing a single topic produces what you would expect -- the topic with the breadcrumbs at the top, just as you see it in the CHM file.

Something I haven't configured properly?

A known limitation of CHM?

A bug?

Thanks,

Wayne

[KevinDAmery]

In your target, there should be an option to "patch stylesheet for HTML Help printing". (I forget exactly which page it's in, and I don't have Flare open at the moment.) That should solve the printing problem.

HOWEVER....

Enabling this option seems to disable the formatting in your stylesheet, so your fonts revert to HTML standard (which is usually times new roman). For this reason, I don't use this option. It's not a nice predicament to be in, but there it is....

One option you might consider is including a PDF copy of the documentation along with the CHM. This way if customers want to print topics they can print from the PDF but you can keep your stylesheet intact for the CHM.

[Wayne Newberry]

Thanks for that information, Kevin.
I tried it and got some interesting results.
I picked a book that had four topics under it and the printed page contained just the breadcrumbs as before.
The font was just as it appears on the screen, a non-serif font. I don't have a good enough eye to be more specific.
I'm wondering if one of the other target settings would make my results line up with your experience.
I don't have a Stylesheet Medium set, for example.
I'll try a few things.

Wayne

[KevinDAmery]

Oohhhh, ok - does the book in question associate with a specific topic, or is it just a container for the child topics? I'm not sure if CHM print is designed to print all children of a book. The menu item you mentioned in your first post suggests it should, but ya never know (this is microsquish we're talking about after all....)

[Wayne Newberry]

The book is linked to a topic which is none of the four children topics.
The printout contains five lines, each of which is the breadcrumb line from the topic.
I'm not sure either about what kind of printing support CHM files offer.
I'll do some Googling to see what I can find out.
By the way, today's Gmail ad on Google is hilarious. Just what I need -- an automated answering tool for my e-mail.

Wayne

[Wayne Newberry]

The solution was the Stylesheet Medium. I had left it at "default" and, by selecting "print" I get the behavior that I wanted.
As a side benefit, all the formatting seems identical to what I see on the screen when I have the CHM file open. The font is non-serif and the page layout is just fine.
I now have a satisfied user and all is well.

Wayne

One postscript to this: During the troubleshooting, I had reversed the order of the body proxy and the breadcrumb proxy to see if that made any difference. The mechanism I used to reverse the order was to delete both and add them back in. This turns out to have been an important element of the solution. If the only change that I made was to select "print" as the Stylesheet Medium, the behavior was unchanged. In fact, it turns out that changing the Stylesheet Medium is not required to resolve the problem. Just updating the proxies is enough.

[KevinDAmery]

The solution was the Stylesheet Medium. I had left it at "default" and, by selecting "print" I get the behavior that I wanted.
As a side benefit, all the formatting seems identical to what I see on the screen when I have the CHM file open. The font is non-serif and the page layout is just fine.
I now have a satisfied user and all is well.

Wayne

Hmm, sounds odd. The Print medium is supposed to be for print output types - i.e. Word, FrameMaker, PDF, that sort of thing. Online formats like HTML Help should use the Default medium.

[LTinker68]

The default medium is used for online viewing, but the print medium is still used by web browsers when a page is printed from the website, if a print medium is included in the stylesheet.