Do not use "print" medium for printed manuals?

[ccardimon]

Does this website make sense, or should I ignore it?

http://kungfuwit.wordpress.com/2009/06/ ... iverables/

[LTinker68]

I'm kind of leaning that way myself after the last project I did. I didn't have to develop online output, but I did need to do two forms of print output, one for a 5" x 8" printed manual and one for an online PDF file set to print on 8.5 x 11. Due to the amount of available space and such on the different page layouts, there were times where I needed a page break before on one heading in one output but not the same heading in the other output. It occurred to me near the end that if I was asked to make an online WebHelp version of the file that I'd have to clean up my styles and rearrange them a bit so that what I set up for the print outputs didn't screw up printing from the WebHelp output.

So my suggestion... Have the "main" print medium set up for printing from online output. In that case, you probably won't need to worry about page-break before or after options because they'll only be printing one topic at a time, so there's no reason to worry about page breaking (for the most part). Keep the print styles to a minimum, because there shouldn't be too much (IMHO) that needs to change between the default styles and the print-from-web styles. Create a new medium and give it a name like printHardCopy or printHC or whatever, and use that medium for any print outputs that you'll be printing yourself or sending to an outside vendor to print. In that medium you an be a lot fancier because you have more control over the printing environment (that is, you don't have to worry about all the different printers the end users may have; you just have to worry about whatever printer you're using).

This is a situation where using multiple stylesheets might be of benefit, because it might be easier to have the hardcopy print medium be a separate stylesheet and let the default/print (print-from-web) mediums be in the other stylesheet. But I go back-and-forth on that, because you'd still have to copy styles from one stylesheet to the other, so is it easier to do that or to switch between multiple mediums in the same stylesheet? That you'll have to decide.

Long post short... Yes, I'm inclined to believe it's a good idea.

[doc_guy]

My short answer: It is a bad idea.

My short answer explained: There are multiple ways to avoid this functionality, and even the blog author has recanted to some extend. My response here is the same it was on the site. You can contunue using the @print section of the style sheet by using two style sheets. One is for online output and another is for printed outputs. My printed style sheet imports (using the @import command) the online style sheet, so I can still build on the online styles, but the print-specific ones (like page breaks, negative margins for headings, etc.) never make it into the print style sheet, so they work just fine for both the web help and for when people print the Webhelp.

If you change the media type, Capture won't re-size your images. You need to be using the proper media type if you want Capture to create media-specific images for you.

[LTinker68]

If you change the media type, Capture won't re-size your images. You need to be using the proper media type if you want Capture to create media-specific images for you.

I don't use Capture, so that's good to know for when I do start using it.