Making a Custom Manual from the Flux Portal

In older versions of Flux, all of the documentation was shipped in PDF files in the Flux installation package. These files came with several limitations: they inflated the size of the installer, they could be difficult to navigate, and, of course, they were impossible to update with new information without requiring a fresh installation in a maintenance release of Flux.

As I’ve written about before, to work around these limitations we’ve adopted a new “wiki-style” approach to our documentation. This new online documentation is constantly updated to adapt to feedback we receive from our users. Of course, this comes with a drawback of its own – because it’s only available online, it is less portable than the PDF documentation, and more difficult to store locally.

Fortunately, the new Flux Portal provides a solution to these problems. In the new Portal, you can easily generate and download your own, custom PDF documentation for Flux. Not only does this allow you to easily save the documentation and allow for portable viewing, but it grants another great benefit: you can easily tailor the documentation to your own requirements, saving only the parts of the manual or other documentation that you are actually interested in reading.

There are two ways to create your own documentation: you can either generate a complete PDF of the entire documentation set, or you can create a PDF file for a single page of the documentation (for example, to download a PDF of a chapter in the manual, or of a specific example).

To generate a PDF of the complete documentation (or some large subset), follow these steps:

1. Log in to the Flux Portal at portal.fluxcorp.com (if you do not have a Flux Portal account already, contact support@fluxcorp.com and we will happily assist you in creating one). Click the space link for the documentation you are interested in downloading (like Flux 7.10).
   

   Select a Documentation Space

2. Hover your cursor over the “Browse” menu in the upper right-hand corner of the page, and select “Advanced” from the menu that appears.
   

   Select "Browse" -> "Advanced"

3. In the menu on the left-hand side of the page that appears, select “PDF Export”.
   

   Select "PDF Export" from the Menu

4. Select the pages you want to be included in the final PDF file. For example, if you are interested in all of the documentation except the home page, release notes, and downloads, your selection might look something like:
   

   Check the Pages you are Interested In

5. Finally, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Export”. You’ll be directed to a new page that will display a progress meter showing the status of the PDF generation and estimated time remaining. Once the progress bar is full, you will be presented with a link to download the PDF file for the documentation you’ve generated.

As you can see, this provides a very flexible way to generate only the documentation you want to see.

If you’re only interested in a single page (rather than the complete documentation), follow these steps to get a PDF file for that page:

1. Follow step 1 above to log in to the Flux Portal and find the documentation for your Flux version.
2. Find the page you want to download as a PDF. For example, In the screen shot below, I’ve selected the Flux installation guide:
   

   Select the Page you want to Download

3. Hover your cursor over the “Tools” icon and select “Export to PDF” from the menu that appears.
   

   Select "Tools" -> "Export to PDF"

   Once you’ve selected “Export to PDF”, your browser will prompt you to save or open the newly generated file.

Because the documentation in the Flux Portal is frequently updated, be sure to check back regularly to guarantee that your PDF copies of the documentation have the most up-to-date information available!

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