Which do you use where in MadCap Flare? This has been a frequently asked question that I think bears answering here. The short answer is:

Master page = online help

Page layouts = printed help/documentation

A more thorough explanation is warranted though.

Master pages

Master pages handle the “headers and footers” of an online help project. Now, you may be thinking “there aren’t headers and footers in online help” and you’d be right. And you’re wrong….

There is a “footer” in the sense that you can build a text below the topic body proxy that shows on every page of a help system. It can contain copyright and contact info…whatever you want to put there. And there is a kind of a header – the breadcrumbs proxy – that also appears on every page.

Page layouts

Page layouts are the master pages of printed documentation. And I won’t lie – they are more complicated than a master page.  It took a bit of time for things to click for me regarding page layouts. But once they did, I was good to go.

If you’re building printed documentation using Flare, you cannot do without page layouts. They handle, among other things,  the headers, footers and margins of your document.

In my experience, you’ll need at least a Cover/Title page layout, a front matter page layout, and then a content page layout (main body of work). You may need more than that – but I’d start there.

When you’re in the page layout, you build your headers and footers using frames. The content from the topics you’ve created would appear in the body frame. You would set margins, positioning, etc here. Here’s a quick page layout for front matter. I’ve added some text to the header, borders to the header and footer frames, and a page number variable in the footer frame. Notice that I have not created first, odd, and even pages for this page layout design.

The trick is that you need to associate a particular page layout with a topic in the TOC. So, if you want a Table of Contents in your printed document, you would create an actual TOC page topic (something you normally wouldn’t do for online help). Within that topic, you’d add your TOC proxy, style it the way you want, etc. To simplify, when you create a new topic for the printed TOC, select TopicForTOC from the New from Template section of the Add New Topic window.

Note that I named the topic Printed TOC so there was no confusion what this topic is down the road. You don’t want to accidentally add this to your webhelp project.

Here’s what the topic looks like after I deleted the intro text and changed the topic title.

Now that the topic exists, we need to add it to the project’s TOC.

Now, you need to assign a particular page layout to that TOC page. This is necessary so Flare knows what headers and footers to apply to the page. Without it, you have a page with no definition. Follow these instructions to assign the Front Matter page layout to the printed TOC topic:

1. Open the project TOC that is associated with your printed target
2. Right-click on the printed TOC topic and select Properties.
3. Select the Printed Output tab.
4. In the Chapter Break section, check Start a new chapter document.
5. In the Configure chapter using this Page Layout pull-down menu, select front_matter (or whatever you’ve named the page layout you want to assign to this topic).
6. Click OK.

The window should look like this:

Here’s what the printed Table of Contents looks like with the page layout.

Notice that I set the pagination to lower roman numerals. Once the main content starts, it switches to Arabic numerals. Also, notice that the printed TOC topic itself does not show in the Table of Contents. I can show you how to do that in another post.

Do you have questions about page layouts? If so, let me know! I’ll try to help.

Out of the box, the default webhelp skin from Flare is not that attractive. It contains every icon they have and the TOC is too jammed together.

Fixing the menu bar and icons is easy….fixing the TOC maybe not so much. Let’s look at what the TOC looks like before it’s touched.

Not very readable, is it? I’ll show you how to fix it.

First, I would like to get rid of the book and page icons. I prefer something a bit less busy. To change the icons, open your skin, click on the Styles tab, and select TocEntry from the list. You’ll see this:

I’m going to replace the book and page icons with triangles, because they’re cleaner and less busy. Here’s the TOC with the new icons.

For me, the icons are little snug for my taste. So I’m going to add some padding (3px) above and below the images. Here’s the result:

Here they are side-by-side:

The change seems small but it makes a lot of difference. More white space in the TOC and less clutter. So, don’t be afraid to change the icons in the TOC and don’t feel obligated to use the book/page icons.

Finally, remember

White space is your friend!