PDF questions

This is normal. Although all the formatting of your topic content is preserved in PDF only the text of your topic headers is used in your PDF documents. In PDF the formatting of your topic headers and the layout of your pages are controlled by the "print manual template" for your PDF output. See Topic headings in PDF for details.

There are a number of possible causes for this:

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Graphics scaling: The first thing to check is the images used in your files. Help & Manual supports image scaling of high-resolution images for PDF files. If you are using large images to improve printout quality your files will be bigger and there is not a lot you can do about it, other than turning off scaling and using smaller images.

•	Graphics compression: Check your image compression settings for PDF in Configuration > Publishing Options > Adobe PDF > PDF Options. You can significantly reduce the size of your files with JPEG compression but this also reduces image quality.

•	Font embedding: Embedded fonts significantly increase the size of PDF files. Unless it's absolutely essential only use standard fonts like Arial and Times Roman so that you don't have to embed fonts. Check your embedding settings in Configuration > Publishing Options > Adobe PDF > Font Embedding.

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Graphics in your PDF template: If you insert very large graphics in your PDF templates this will also increase the size of your PDF. Check all the template sections for forgotten graphics, including graphics objects whose size has accidentally been made very small – they will still be exported to the PDF!

Note that the nominal image format doesn't affect the size of your PDF files. All supported formats are converted to bitmaps.

If you are upgrading from Help & Manual 3 you may be looking for the Project Properties settings that activate and deactivate PDF components (TOC, Introduction etc.) in your output. This functionality is now only available in the print manual template, which you must edit with the Print Manual Designer. In Help & Manual 3 it was possible to make these settings in two places (Project Properties and the template), and this caused conflicts and mistakes for some users.

Go to Configuration > Publishing Options > Adobe PDF > PDF Layout and deselect the option Ignore blank pages in PDF file. Setting this option disables the "Start on odd pages" setting because it makes it impossible to insert blank pages in the output to force topics to start on odd pages.

When you place graphics on the page without tables they are automatically resized to fit on the page in PDF. This is not possible for graphics in tables, however, because here the table cell and not the page is the container for the graphic. When you insert graphics in tables you need to make sure that your layout will fit on the page. In addition to graphics clipping oversized graphics in tables will also switch all column widths to variable in PDF, which will probably mess up your layout.

Help & Manual uses a printer driver to generate PDF documents and "optimized" drivers from printer manufacturers sometimes cause output problems.

You can solve this problem by installing a different printer driver and selecting it as the reference driver for PDF generation. This driver does not have to be for a printer that is physically connected to your computer. In fact, you will probably achieve the best results with a standard printer driver from the Windows CD rather than with an "optimized" driver from a printer manufacturer.

If you are not using WMF or EMF graphics it is generally best to use the screen device to generate PDFs. A proper printer driver is needed to mange EMF and WMF graphics, however.

See Customize - PDF Export for details on how to set this up.

Go to Configuration > Publishing Options > Adobe PDF > PDF Layout and activate the Underline topic links and paint in color: option to define the visibility and color of the hyperlinks in your PDF document.

For more details see PDF Layout.

PDF is really a print-style documentation format that was not originally designed for use as interactive help. Hyperlinks within PDF files will now work but you cannot link between PDF files.

You can link to external PDF files with file links, provided the external PDF is in the same folder as the PDF containing the link, but this will only open the PDF file. You cannot link to a specific topic inside an external PDF file.