Cover page used for every page in partial publish of a book

[bfriesen]

We have a custom style sheet designed for use that has a cover page built into to it. When publishing the complete book, the cover page only prints on the cover. If I print a portion of the book ie 3 or 4 differnet topics with some having topic heads, it prints the cover seperatly, then uses the cover page again for all the body pages.

Is arbortext 6.0 capable of publishing only sections of a manual or does it need to print the whole book each time. Just trying to cut down on publishing time as it is almost 20min to publish entire book.

[bfriesen · Accepted solution]

The problem is that our style sheet is not configured to print multiple topics. We need to ensure that our style sheet at minimum sees a chapter so it knows how to properly print the section. It will print a single topic fine.

Excerpt from tech support response

When you open the smamaptemplate.ditamap file, which is the file you will see if you select File->New and pick your map doctype, you can see it has frontmatter and backmatter elements and that the only elements you can insert after frontmatter are appendix, chapter and part. Each of these elements are styled in the style sheet to change the page set when they are encountered.

In your test document, there is no chapter element. The document starts with the servicemanualmap element which sets the page set to SMA Cover page. There no elements that change the page set. When you encounter the topic element after booktitle, it is set to continue whatever page set is being used, so that is why you are seeing the cover page set used throughout your test document.

You may need to talk to your administrator regarding the best practices for structuring your documents so that they are in context and then the style sheet should work as you expect.

When the topic is stand alone, it is not wrapped in the servicemanualmap tag, so the cover page set is not called and it uses a different page set. You can see what pageset is being used by doing a File->Print Preview. In the preview window, right-click on the page in question and select Show Page Attributes.