Control How Your PDF Pages Break
Decide how many steps go on a page, whether the picture sits above the text or beside it, and what the contents page lists.
Where the Settings Are
Everything on this page is on the Document tab of the PDF export settings, reached by clicking Export and choosing PDF.
How Steps Fall on the Page
Step content flow changes the document more than any other setting here. It has three modes.
- One step per page: Every step starts a new page. Long, but nothing is ever split, and each page is one thing to do. The right choice for a procedure someone follows at a machine.
- Keep steps together, do not split content: Fits several steps per page, but moves a step to the next page rather than break it across the gap. The sensible default for most guides.
- Fit as much content per page as possible: Packs the pages and lets a step split. Fewest pages, and the option to pick when you care about paper more than about reading.
Page Layout sets the paper size, and there is a separate orientation control beside it. A landscape page suits wide application screenshots and costs you nothing in readability.
Picture Beside Text Instead of Above It
Setting Layout to Two-column (image + text) puts each screenshot next to its description rather than under it, which suits short instructions and wide pictures.
Image position then decides which side the screenshot sits on. Note that choosing two columns hides Step content flow: the layout controls the page breaks itself.
A Contents Page Worth Having
- Switch on Include Table Of Contents.Two more settings appear underneath it.
- Set Table of Contents Depth to how far down you want it to go.
- Change the 'Table Of Contents' translation if the guide is not in English.
Depth is the one worth thinking about. It runs from a single level up to all of them, and what it lists is the nesting you built in the editor: a guide with substeps has levels to show, a flat one does not. Listing every substep of a forty-step guide produces a contents page longer than some readers need, so level 1 to 2 is usually the useful setting.
Include steps numeration is separate, and controls whether the steps themselves are numbered in the body of the document.
What this is good for
- Stop a step splitting across two pages in a printed procedure.
- Fit a forty-step guide into something people will actually print.
- Give a long guide a contents page that is useful rather than exhaustive.
Make guides like this one
Folge captures a screenshot on every click, so a guide writes itself as you work.
