Hello,
One of our clients needs to print some of the pages from our documents to PDF but apparently none of the drivers is working properly and when it comes to big images, tables or other contents, they will get cut off leaving the rest of the page as blank.
When I tried to convert the whole help project to PDF in HTMLhelpBuilder, it asked for changing the template to "MSword" instead of "Darkhan" and the output PDF looked fine to me but I'm not quite sure how I can apply the same idea to the final help html pages to be used by the end user.
I would appreciate any help on this.
Thanks,
Kathy
Help Builder uses Word Automation to create a Word document from the HTML, then saves that as a PDF file. This is pretty slow and unlikely to work (due to licensing at minimum) on a server so I wouldn't recommend that.
For documents that aren't massive I've use wkHtml2Pdf which is basically the Chromium engine for PDF output. It works well and really does a good job preserving the fidelity of the document. I use it in Markdown Monster for PDF generation.
But it hangs (or maybe just takes ultra long) with very large documents - I couldn't make it work with the Web Connection help file in Help Builder for example. The MS Word processing does work - it's slow too - but because it's automation it's more flexible.
Not sure if there are good solutions that are easy. Maybe check with Equeus (The XFRX guy) and see what he has. I seem to recall he had a few tools to do various inter type conversions.
+++ Rick ---
Thank you so much Rick.
It looks like MS Word is working for most pages in our case but I'm going to try wkHtml2Pdf and I will Equeus in mind as well.
If I want to provide users with wkHtml2Pdf so they can use it for whatever page/s they want, should I do any change in HTML Help Builder?
Sorry - I just realized I misunderstood your question... I wasn't thinking about Help Builder here but on how to create PDF documents in a server app (there is another topic going on that too)...
To be clear - inside of Help Builder the only way we support PDF output is via Word. The converter creates a Word document and then saves that document to PDF. This works reasonably well - I can run this against the massive Web Connection documentation and it does a decent job, albeit it's very slow to get through the nearly 2000 topics. It's not perfect though and you'll likely have to tweak the final document headers/template slightly (or you can tweak the project Word template if you do this a lot).
The other solution I mentioned are not something that is supported with Help Builder...
+++ Rick ---
I got it.
Thank you so much.
Kathy
