Publishing One Book to Various Page Sizes (Print)

There may be times when you want to produce multiple printed outputs of the same document. For example let's say you need to produce both an A4 and a smaller A5 version of the same manual. Or for the Americans out there, let's say you need to create both a 7" X 9" manual as well as the typical 8.5" X 11" (Letter) size manual.

Your page size and margins are controlled by the Media Objects – rather than your Word Publishing template. This means that it's not necessarily a "simple" task of just creating a new Word Publishing template or of duplicating the Books and/or Topics, as you'd also need to define new media objects and associate those media objects to each Topic...

We're looking at options that will allow you to associate Media Objects at a Book level (rather than at Topic level) for a future release, but in the meantime the simplest solution is to make the changes to your Media Objects prior to publishing. As the Media Objects used by your printed output are all based on the Paper Size template, you should only need to change that one template, and the changes will automatically be cascaded throughout your document.

To Adjust the Page Size prior to Publishing:

1. Open the Paper Size Template (located in your Restricted > Object Templates folder)
2. Select the Document tab, then the Paper Size subtab.
3. Choose or specify the appropriate Page Size and save your changes. A message appears that saving the changes to this template will update (number of) objects that are based on it and you are asked if you wish to continue. Choose Yes.
4. Publish your document
5. Repeat these steps each time you need to alter the page size.

You will also most likely need different Word templates - as the autotext entries used by your Headers and Footers may need different formatting (because the page size will be smaller), and the styles in the TOC and MiniTOC may need different tab stop positions. Consider creating two books - one for each page size - with the second Book simply containing the first as described in Using Books Inside Books. This way you can define a different Word Publishing template for each book without having to alter the Book Object each time you publish.

Likewise, you'll probably need to give some thought to the tables and graphics used in your Book, as if you have varying page sizes these may not always "fit" within the margins. If you're using the Workgroup or Enterprise edition, you can use variables to use different sized file objects for each Book.