The “Other” Pages
There are several pages in the printed document that can cause even more confusion. I’m talking about the Table of Contents, the Glossary, and the Index.
Much of the confusion revolves around naming conventions, and the Table of Contents is slightly more confusing than the others, so I’ll concentrate on it. If you’re creating online help, Flare uses the TOC nominated in the target properties to generate the table of contents that (normally) appears in the left hand pane of your help. You can see this in compiled HTML or .chm, web help, and dot net help. Printed targets don’t get off so easily.
The first thing to consider is Flare builds the output using the TOC specified in the project as its plan. If you want to include a topic in the output it must be in the TOC. A lot of time you will be using the “default” TOC, created when you started the project. Its name is Master and you can see it using Windows Explorer under Project -> TOCs as Master.fltoc (for Flare TOC).
When Flare builds the project, using the TOC, it applies TOC levels to the resulting Word document. Word uses the TOC levels to build the table of contents in much the same way as it does when working natively in Word. If you look in a stylesheet, each of your headings has a property mc-heading-level. You can see it under PrintSupport. Normally this value corresponds with the heading level, but if you wanted to elevate all your headings to the same level in the table of contents produced by Word you can set mc-heading-level for all headings to “1″. If you don’t want a heading to appear in the table of contents, set the value to “0″.
You can see why its confusing – Flare has a TOC for building and Word produces a table of contents. But wait, there’s more.
As stated above, Word produces the table of contents from the heading levels. But we need to tell Word, through Flare that we want a table of contents and where we would like to place it. To do this we need to create a topic for the table of contents. Most people would name the topic toc.htm, table_of_contents.htm, or something similar. That’s alright, but it introduces another toc type of name into the mix.
So, we have a topic for our table of contents. You’ve named it something clever, like topic_toc.htm, to avoid confusion. Now we have to add a proxy so Flare knows to build the table of contents. And, you’ve guessed it, the proxy is the TOC proxy. To add the proxy Insert -> Proxy -> TOC Proxy… You end up with a proxy in your topic with the description output toc proxy.
If you look at the example, which is confusingly named toc.htm, you’ll notice the text “Table of Contents”. You may be forgiven for thinking its a heading style, but although it is a large blue font and uses small caps (which is the h2 style in this project), its actually a paragraph formatted to look that way. Why? I don’t like “Table of Contents” to appear in my table of contents, and if the table of contents gets built from heading levels I need to make sure the text isn’t a heading.
You can also see a tab marked “Master”. That’s the master toc used to build my printed target.
So now we have a toc proxy in a toc topic (with the text “table of contents”) used by the master toc to create a table of contents. Can it get more confusing? You bet.
We use Chicago Manual of Style. What does Chicago say about table of contents? It starts on page 5 (depending on what else constitutes you front matter), uses roman numerals, and is a recto (odd page number or right hand side) page. You may have other considerations because of your company style guide, such as the header says “Table of Contents” or similar. Knowing what we do about masterpages, we know we are going to need a masterpage just for our table of contents.
We can create our masterpage easy enough. We can see the confusing pattern of naming occurring, so we call our masterpage masterpage_toc.flmsp. And we set Page Type -> Type to odd , Page Numbers -> Start Number to “5″, and Number Format to “i (lowercase roman). We make sure we’ve included page numbers on the masterpage.
The final step is to assign the masterpage to the topic in the toc Flare uses to build the output. Open the toc (if its the default toc you can open it by clicking the Open the Master TOC button. It looks like a hand pointing at a book ) and add the TOC topic to the master TOC (you can drag and drop from the Content Explorer). Make sure the topic is selected and press [F4] to open the properties dialog. Select the Printed Output tab and then the Start a new section check box. Choose the TOC masterpage from the drop-down list. Make sure you set the next topic’s masterpage so it doesn’t use the toc masterpage.
And that’s it. Just do something similar with your glossary and index, and you are well on the way to producing professional printed documents from Flare.
