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I thought I would pass this along - it may come in handy. And no, I don't
work for the manufacturer. I'm just a keyboard grunt.
I recently installed RoboHelp X5, which included a utility called RoboPDF
(which is also available as a standalone product). This is a program that
converts files to PDFs. I've used it to make PDFs from Word files, text
files, Excel files, HTML files, and PowerPoint files. RoboPDF manifests
as a menu in the toolbar of the MS Word interface.
Up until now, I had been creating PDFs from my Word files by using the
plugin that came with Adobe Acrobat 5.0. In my opinion, RoboPDF is
infinitely superior. It runs much, much faster and does not give me those
annoying "out of memory" messages.
The time saving is tremendous. I have one Word document that took more
than 20 minutes to make into a PDF when using the Adobe plugin. RoboPDF
did the same job in maybe a fifth of that time.
The viewer that RoboPDF opens includes a feature that lets you change
security settings, and that interface is a little different from the
security wizard in Adobe Acrobat. For one thing, it does not include a
selection for Adobe "Self-Sign" security. It does allow you to set all
the other usual PDF security parameters.
(RoboPDF does not open Acrobat or Acrobat Reader. I don't know if it
requires Adobe to be installed first, but I doubt it.)
Setting levels for the PDF bookmarks is a bit tricky. When starting from
a Word file, RoboPDF lets you select whether you want to produce the
bookmarks in the finished PDF from the Word TOC or from the styles used
for section headings. In either case, apparently the heading styles must
be based on one or another of the standard Word heading styles (Heading1
through Heading9). So if you have heading styles based on something else,
they may not show up in the PDF bookmarks.
The "Conversion Options" dialog opened from the RoboPDF menu allows you to
change the outline level used when converting a TOC entry to a PDF
bookmark (for example, if you have a level 3 heading style in the
document, you can promote that to level 1 in the PDF). If you open the
options dialog and click on a number in the "Level" column, you get a
pull-down menu. But, it's not apparent - the interface does not have a
notice that you can change the outline level, and you have to click right
*on* the level number. I stumbled across the change capability only by
accident.
The RoboPDF help system gave me some trouble. When I tried to open the
help from the Word toolbar menu or from a "Help" button on the conversion
options dialog, half the time Word crashed. Other times Word didn't
crash, but the help ran *very* slowly.
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>From a single set of Word documents, create online Help and printed
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