Publishing > PDF and Printed Manuals > The Print Manual Designer

The Print Manual Designer is a separate program used for editing the print manual template files that define the layout and appearance of your published PDF files and printed manuals.

In addition to defining the layout of your PDF pages you can also add additional pages and content not included in your project, including cover and back cover pages, an introduction, a formatted table of contents, title pages for individual chapters, headers and footers, a formatted index and multiple endnotes pages. You can also add your own custom pages and insert topics from your project and external Help & Manual XML files.

The Print Manual Designer has its own help so this topic only describes the basic procedures for opening templates for editing and selecting them in your projects. Print manual template files have the extension .mnl.

•Select the Manual Designer tool in Project > Tools.

rbn_manualdesigner

If a template has already been used to publish a PDF from the current project this will open the Designer and load that template.

If you have not yet used a PDF template you should start with one of the standard templates included with Help & Manual. It is generally easier to edit an existing template, because all the necessary objects have already been added and you just need to modify them. The standard templates can be found in the \Templates\pdf folder in the Help & Manual program directory, which is normally C:\Program Files\EC Software\HelpAndManual6.

It is a good idea to make a copy of the sample template instead of working on the original. If you are using Windows Vista you will generally be unable to save template files in the template directory – you must save a copy in a directory for which your user account has full read and write permissions.

It is a good idea to store the working copy of your print manual template in your project directory if you want to keep all the files used by your project in one place.

The template last used to publish your project to PDF output will normally be opened automatically when you select the Manual Designer tool in the Project menu. Otherwise you can just use Open in the Manual Designer's file menu to open the template you want to edit, or double-click on the .mnl template file in Windows Explorer.

Note that you can use different templates for PDF and print manual output. Both settings are stored automatically after being selected.

You select the template to be used with your project in the Publish settings when you are publishing your project. Once you have made a selection there Help & Manual will remember the setting the next time you publish your project to PDF.

Selecting a template for Adobe PDF output:

1.Select Publish in the File menu and then select PDF as your publishing format.

dlg_mnlselect

2.Select the PDF template you want to use by clicking on the drop-down area shown above.

Selecting a template for printed manuals:

1.Open your project, click on the File menu and select Print Manual.

dlg_mnlselect_print

2.Select the PDF template you want to use by clicking on the drop-down area shown above.