MadCap Software Forums

I am setting up a page layout that will allow me to single-source my help for a white paper/how-to document that will be in PDF output format.

In the help topic, I have a note with the p.note style applied to it that appears near the top of the topic. In the white paper/how-to document, we would like that note to appear at the bottom of the page layout, similar to a footnote.

I've tried everything I can think of, separate flows on the page layout, changing the position of the paragraph by applying a float to the p.note style (using many of the options in the Position tab), using a Clear and a Vertical alignment with the Float, etc.

So, my question is -- Does anyone know of a way to separate content from its original location in the topic and placing that content in a different location when it is output to print with the page layout?

Someone smarter than me may know of a way to do that, but it may be simpler just to put it in both places and use conditional tags to show or hide the notes in online and print output.

Bob

You can put the p.note inside a DIV and set that DIV to be a certain distance from the bottom of the page. I'm not entirely sure that would work for PDF output, though. For online, yes, but for PDF, I have a feeling it might not work. It might just generate the content at the point it appears in the page code, but you could try it on one or two topics to see if it works.

To position that DIV, in the stylesheet, you'd want to set its position to absolute (I think) and then set its bottom property to .5 inches or something. Note that it's the bottom property, just like that -- not margin-bottom, not padding-bottom, but bottom.

I placed the p.note inside of a Div and changed the position and bottom properties in the stylesheet for medium = print. It looks like the PDF output completely ignores the property and even removes the p.note text from the output. I applied the same settings to my medium=default and the output does notice the DIV settings. So your feeling about the PDF output was correct. Thank You for responding to this question, I appreciate your time!

What sort of content is in p.note? I.e. is it something that changes on a topic by topic basis, or is it pretty standardized? If it's standardized, you could put it in the master page (for online output) and the page layout (for PDF output): this would allow you to position it as required for each output type. If it's unique to each topic, though, this method probably wouldn't work (or would be painful to manage at the least).