I feel like I've been boxed into a corner quite willingly and that when I'm trying to get out of the corner, the ideal option was unavailable yesterday, not present today, and probably will not be able to be selected in the future. Yet, when I think about how I got to where I am, I'm content.
Here's the deal. We switched from using Word to create PDFs to Confluence, a wiki-based tool. It's sweet, it's easy to use snippets, and when we get to the point where we can distribute our content as a Confluence page, we will not distribute PDFs and we will move away from the idea of a printed book.
In the meantime, though, our deliverable for the content we have in Confluence is a PDF. And let me tell you that delivering PDFs from Confluence is not working. The PDF is ugly, even with the CSS I've been using. Essentially, it's like going to a web page and clicking Print except that instead of going to a printer, it goes to a PDF file. The main limitation we are facing and I am trying to resolve is that you can't control the layout. That's the bottomline. We currently get page breaks wherever the content warrants. Sure, I can whip up some fancy CSS and define a heading as "page break before" in the CSS and apply it to various pages, but why? We don't want a page break before each heading, though, because some of the content within the heading is shorter than a 1/2 page and the end result will be a PDF with an inflated page count.
No answers, but I need to get to work.
Follow up: the part of the user guide - I'll call it TNEC - that was causing the issue with pagination? Well, we can now distribute TNEC as a separate document. Also, there are two sub-sections in the TNEC main section and only one of the sub-sections needs to be distributed. This is going to be easy!
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