Printing help topics?

[David Webber]

My compiled CHM file runs with an "options" button, which gives access to a
"Print" command.

But no Page Setup.

When I print a topic, header and footer information are printed:

Header-left: topic title
Header-right: Page p of P
Footer-left: the URL
Footer-right: the date.

In IE7 this comes about with a header and footer set respectively to

"&w&bPage &p of &P"
"&u&b&d"

[In passing: I can guess it, but is the syntax documented anywhere?]

If I remove these in IE7's page setup, then my chm topic prints as desired
without header and footer.

Questions:

Is there a way of getting to the page-setup from the .chm window? It seems
daft to have to launch IE7 separately to do this.

Is there a way of printing the .chm topic with given header/footer and
leaving IE7's defaults alone. So that next time I print a web page, I
automatically get what I always did?

Dave

[Rob Cavicchio]

Post by David Webber
Is there a way of getting to the page-setup from the .chm window? It
seems daft to have to launch IE7 separately to do this.

There is nothing automatically exposed for the user to access "Page Setup"
from within a CHM. However, you can access certain features of the IE Web
browser control through scripting, and thus as an author you can provide a
link that opens the dialog box for the user. This page on Microsoft's Web
site explains how to do it:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms976105.aspx

Post by David Webber
Is there a way of printing the .chm topic with given header/footer and
leaving IE7's defaults alone. So that next time I print a web page, I
automatically get what I always did?

Unfortunately, I don't think so. The same settings apply to everything
printed from IE. The only thing I've been able to do from the authoring side
is to dynamically change the title of a document (via the DOM property
"document.title"). If the title placeholder is part of the header/footer
information, it uses the customized string rather than the static <title>
actually embedded in the HTML file. This can be useful.


********************
Rob Cavicchio
***@mvps.org