help Affinity Online Help Resource (Printable)

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, Wosven said:

but it would be better as CHM file

Maybe for Windows, but to my knowledge Macs do not use or support that file format.

Regardless, if the goal is to create a printable PDF, I do not see why we need to consider reflowing text, preserving HTML links, or anything of that nature.

[Wosven]

17 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I do not see why we need to consider reflowing text, preserving HTML links, or anything of that nature.

Having a full index would be important, even if we don't have page number,at least to check if what we need is in a chapter (imagine search for advanced table formats...)

Reflowing would be important, to or modifying the code for people wanting a bigger text to read (I'm getting older, and I understand better now why people complain about small text ), this way, the PDF would get bigger text too, without needing to zoom on the pages.

 

It's perhaps not for printing the whole document, as I did with HTML and CSS documentations long ago to read them entirely, but perhaps simply to print important features a simple post-it won't suffice to remember, or some chapters. Or the shortcuts...

But the print button doesn't work, like some sub-menus in the shortcut section.

 

[R C-R]

10 minutes ago, Wosven said:

Having a full index would be important, even if we don't have page number,at least to check if what we need is in a chapter (imagine search for advanced table formats...)

By index do you mean links to other pages or help topics or something else? Without page numbers, I do not see how an index would be of much use for anything, nor how the conversion to PDF should determine what to index.

13 minutes ago, Wosven said:

Reflowing would be important, to or modifying the code for people wanting a bigger text to read...

Which is why I prefer viewing the online topics in a browser like Safari that can enlarge text.

15 minutes ago, Wosven said:

It's perhaps not for printing the whole document, as I did with HTML and CSS documentations long ago to read them entirely, but perhaps simply to print important features a simple post-it won't suffice to remember, or some chapters.

In the online version of the help, I use the favorites feature for that. Not a perfect solution but I find it a lot easier to find things in my favorites list than having to look through a bunch of printouts.

27 minutes ago, Wosven said:

But the print button doesn't work, like some sub-menus in the shortcut section.

It works for some topics but it doesn't preserve any interactive content (I don't know how it could!) & for others that do not have any roll-overs or the like it works incompletely, if at all. But it all comes down to the point that printouts cannot support most of the features of electronic versions so "converting" the latter to the former will never be straightforward or free of compromises.

[Wosven]

3 hours ago, R C-R said:

By index do you mean links to other pages or help topics or something else?

Yes, it's more a TOC than an index. It can be usefull since, after few reading of the TOC, you know a little bit about the order or the different parts, and you can scroll the pages knowing it's after of before the current one... or you think you know it!

In the PDF version, the links work, but you only get the headers of the TOC.

3 hours ago, R C-R said:

Which is why I prefer viewing the online topics in a browser like Safari that can enlarge text.

Same here, or copying the folder to put it on a smartphone to look at it.

3 hours ago, R C-R said:

Not a perfect solution but I find it a lot easier to find things in my favorites list than having to look through a bunch of printouts.

You can keep important parts and annotate them easily. Some people learn better reading and writting things (as opposed to video, for example).

The export need some tweaking to get the TOC right, since my default for usual book produce a strange TOC:

 

 

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, Wosven said:

Yes, it's more a TOC than an index. It can be usefull since, after few reading of the TOC, you know a little bit about the order or the different parts, and you can scroll the pages knowing it's after of before the current one... or you think you know it!

I give up! How do you scroll in the pages of a printout, or for that matter know which page something is on without page numbers? Are you maybe considering binding the printout(s) so the order of their pages could never be changed? This sounds like a lot of work with very little benefit.

13 minutes ago, Wosven said:

The export need some tweaking to get the TOC right, since my default for usual book produce a strange TOC:

How are you generating the TOC from the help pages? 

[Wosven]

37 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I give up! How do you scroll in the pages of a printout, or for that matter know which page something is on without page numbers? Are you maybe considering binding the printout(s) so the order of their pages could never be changed? This sounds like a lot of work with very little benefit.

Flip the pages? I'm not sure of the term, but did you never search something in a book just like this, until you found the part you want? (At least some illustrated book, it's more difficult with only text, unless searching for a specific chapter.

And I tend to keep the pages in the same order, even those without number, unless an accident occur and they end up unordered.

Perhaps it's an habit we've got, doing books, printing pages, and searching in them, keeping them ordered.

 

43 minutes ago, R C-R said:

How are you generating the TOC from the help pages? 

For this test, I just let the app do it, and by default it'll use usual HTML headers (but I tend to write the code I need, to be sure, not in this case). Since the TOC is made of lists, it didn't give good results with the help files.

Duplicating and modifying the index.html (using headers and disabling javascript) should be enough to get a correct import.

[R C-R]

18 minutes ago, Wosven said:

Flip the pages? I'm not sure of the term...

In English, it probably would be leaf through the pages or something similar.

20 minutes ago, Wosven said:

For this test, I just let the app do it, and by default it'll use usual HTML headers (but I tend to write the code I need, to be sure, not in this case). Since the TOC is made of lists, it didn't give good results with the help files.

Which app are you talking about? 

[Wosven]

7 hours ago, R C-R said:

Which app are you talking about? 

Calibre.