Publishing a PDF

You can use SDL XML Professional Publisher (XPP) to format and paginate your publication and create a PDF, or you can publish a PDF using a third-party PDF publishing engine.

Before you begin

If you will use SDL XPP, it must be installed and configured. If using a third-party PDF publishing engine, you must perform additional setup (see "Configuring third-party output formats").
Before publishing a very large publication, increase the Tomcat session-timeout on the Contenta Web server to be long enough to encompass the time it takes to export all files from Contenta to the file system, and increase the Tomcat session timeout on the XPP server to be long enough to encompass the time it takes to create a PDF of the publication.

About this task

When you publish a PDF, you select the publication modules, applicability, format, and other options. The publishing options that are available in your publishing configuration may vary.

Procedure

  1. In Contenta S1000D, select the desired Configuration, Project, or PModule object.
  2. Click Tools, and then click S1000D Publish.
  3. In the Publications field, select one or more PMs that you want to publish.
  4. If any of the selected PMs has applicability, perform the following steps:
    1. Click Set Applicability.
    2. Select a PM.

      If the referenced ACT DM is an ACT Catalog DM (available in Issue 4.1 or higher), a message is displayed indicating that ACT Catalog DMs are not supported, and the Publication Module Applicability window is not displayed. (ACT Catalog DMs have an infocode of 0A3, whereas ACT DMs have an infocode of 00W.)

    3. Indicate the content that you want to be rendered.
      If a check box is not selected or a text field does not contain a valid value, the content with that applicability will be rendered in the PDF output.
    4. Click Apply Applicability.
      The applicability that you select here applies until you close the browser.
  5. In the Formats field, click one of the following:
    • If using XPP, click A4 or 8.5" x 11"
    • If using a third-party PDF publishing engine, click Contenta to name-of-your-PDF-publishing-engine.
  6. Optionally, click Save Exported Files.
    This preserves the temporary files so that you can use them for troubleshooting.
  7. Check the Get Latest Content check box to obtain the latest versions of reusable components (warnings, cautions, support equipment, supplies, spares) from the CSDB repository. Uncheck this check box to output the versions of reusable components that are in each data module, which may not be the latest versions, or if your site is not using the SDL Contenta S1000D reusable components functionality, that is, not storing reusable components in the CSDB repository. Defaults to checked.
  8. XPP only:
    1. Scale Graphics
      This option scales graphics to Best Fit (the width is set to full).
    2. Save XPP Job
      This option retains the job directory on the XPP server.
  9. Click Publish.
    While Publish is running, progress messages are displayed in the Publish window.
  10. After Publish completes, click View Log, then scroll to the bottom of the publish log.
  11. Click the link to open the PDF that you just published.
    The PDF opens in a new browser window. The PDF file name is unique and is comprised of the PM name, time stamp, and process ID.
  12. If Publish completed with errors or warnings, scroll through the publish log to find the errors or warnings, which are highlighted (yellow background). For example, Publish warns about any missing or invalid WCN targets:

    [WARNING] Cannot find BRAKE-AAA-DA1-10-00-00AA-251A-A_FR-FR in Contenta Database

Example