Highwire User Guide 6.0 > Preparing Documents for Conversion

Hiding Document Sections

Web documents often contain elements that either don't translate well or are not necessary in printed documents. For example, they often feature a sidebar of links that help the user navigate the web site. However, such a sidebar would hardly make sense on a printed page. On the flip-side, there may be information that you want printed in your Highwire document, but hidden in the web page.

Highwire's <ctignore> and <ctadd> tags were created for such purposes. They allow you to hide sections of a web document from Highwire, or to hide sections of your document from web browsers.

Note: Alternatively, you could detect a client's user agent from your web application and vary your content based on whether or not the client is Highwire (see "Detecting Highwire User Agent").

To hide a section from Highwire

If there is a section of your document that you want Highwire to ignore, you can specify that Highwire should ignore it using the following steps.

  1. Open your HTML/XHTML document in an HTML or text editor, such as Notepad.
  2. Immediately before the start of the document section you wish to hide from Highwire, insert the following tag.
  3. <!-- <ctignore> -->

  4. Immediately after the end of the document section you wish to hide from Highwire, insert the following tag.
  5. <!-- </ctignore> -->

  6. Save your changes.

For example, if you had an image tag that contained an advertisement you wanted only to appear on the web page, your document might look like this:

Example 3.3 Hiding a document section from Highwire

<p>This is the last paragraph in the first section.</p>

<!-- <ctignore> -->

<img src="ad.jpeg" alt="an advertisement that should only appear in a web browser" />

<!-- </ctignore> -->

<h2>Start of next section</h2>

To hide a section from your browser, but not Highwire

If there is a section of your document that you want Highwire to render, but don't want to be visible in a web page, you can hide it from your web browser using the following steps.

  1. Open your HTML/XHTML document in an HTML or text editor, such as Notepad.
  2. Immediately before the start of the document section you wish to hide from web browsers, insert the following tag.
  3. <!-- <ctadd>

    Note that we don't close the comment. This is because the comment is what instructs the web browser to ignore the section. The <ctadd> tag instructs Highwire to go ahead and include the contents inside of it.
  4. Immediately after the end of the document section you wish to hide from web browsers, insert the following tag.
  5. </ctadd> -->

  6. Save your changes.

For example, if you had some text that you wanted to appear only in the Highwire document, your web document might look like this:

Example 3.4 Hiding a document section from a browser

<p>This is the last paragraph in the first section.</p>

<!-- <ctadd>

<p>This text <em>shouldn't</em> appear in your web browser. It will only appear when you convert this document to PDF with Highwire.</p>

</ctadd> -->

<h2>Start of next section</h2>

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