Fonts do not look consistent and am using style sheet

[annmic]

The fonts in my table look different than the fonts in the rest of my page. My style sheet is set at Ms_Help.css for the entire page. I click in the table and see it set to the Verdana font. I also click above the table and it also says Verdana. they both are set to 10 pt. I generate Webhelp and still the fonts look different. Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this? Please let me know. Thanks.

[CraigCC]

Try using and applying a specific .css style for the text in the table.
My guess is that you are using inline styles and the table text has got its knickers in a twist. You can also check the true code to see what is happening. Using specfic .css styles is a lot more reliable than selecting the entire table and applying fonts.

Kind Regards
Craig

[annmic]

Well, I highlight the text in the table, then I clciked on topic properties and then on the appearance tab. The style sheet that is highlighted is MS_help.css. I highlight the text above the table and see it set to the same style sheet when I click on the appearance tab under topic properties. However, when I look in the true code, I see that the class names for the text in the table
and the class names for the rest of the page are different. Not sure what to do from here. Anyone have any ideas? Please help. Thanks.

[MergeThis]

External style sheets apply to the entire topic, not to selected areas.

You're actually thisclose to figuring it out. Open the CSS in Notepad (not in RH) and look for the classes that you've already found in the topic. If you found "p class=stdbody" you're looking for an entry starting with "p.stdbody {", etc.

If you want them to look alike, simply match the font info for each class, save the CSS file, and presto, chango!


Good luck,
Leon

[annmic]

I'm wondering if the way I did this is okay. Before I got a reply, I went into the True Code portion and did a search on fonts and classes. Then I changed the font sizes and fonts if they looked inconsistent and checked them in the WSYWIG. Then I previewed them. I also went into WSYWIG and clicked my cursor on each paragraph. I checked the font and fontsize on the toolbar above when I did this. Is this another good way of doing this? Is there any reason that I still need to go into Notepad to change thte style sheets? Please let me know. I have to get this ready for production. Thanks for your help.

[MergeThis]

You'll probably have to muddle through the way you have for this production, force-fitting the formatting where necessary.

Once you've shipped this version, come back and provide us a bit of sampling from the True Code so that we can start advising you on a long-term solution.


Good luck,
Leon

[annmic]

One thing I wondered about was perhaps having font sets for all my topics. Is there a fast way to do this for all my topics at once or do I have to do it topic by topic? Also, I thought I would make my choices Verdana, then Arial, then Helvetica. However, when I look at my choices I don't seem to have Helvetica as an option. I thought these were supposed to be the 3 best fonts for online help. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi annmic. I haven't tried this but I believe once you have your font set created that it is available as a "font" in your style sheet. You can change your CSS file to use the font set rather than a particular font. See if that works. If you don't have helvetica you can always download it and install it.

[RoboColum_n_]

Sorry forgot to add that this updates the project's rhfontset.apj file. If you have merged/multiple projects you can copy this file into the project directories before opening them to ensure they use the same fontset.

[RoboWizard]

Hi all

Hopefully the following will help:

To create a font set:

1. Open a topic in the WYSIWYG Editor.

2. From the Format menu, select Font Sets.
The Font Sets dialog opens. It lists all fonts and font sets that are currently available in your Help project.

3. Click New.
RoboHelp displays a new, untitled field in the Font sets list.

4. In Font sets, type the desired name "Whatever you want Fontset" over the selected word "Untitled" and then press Enter.

5. Click Modify. The Modify Font Set dialog opens.

6. In the Available Typefaces text box, select Verdana and click the Add >> button.
RoboHelp adds the font Verdana as the primary font in your font set.

7. In the Available Typefaces text box, type Arial. Then click the Add >> button.

8. Now add a Macintosh-compatible font. RoboHelp can only find the system fonts available on your Microsoft Windows authoring system, but you can type any font name into the dialog, even if it is not on your authoring system.

In the Available Typefaces text box, type "Helvetica", which is a Macintosh system font. Then click the Add >> button.

9. Click OK to close the Modify Font Set dialog.

10. Click OK to close the Font Sets dialog. RoboHelp adds the new font set to your project.

As for recommended or "best" fonts, here is more verbiage from this topic.

Tips:

The new font set is available from both the WYSIWYG toolbar and the Format > Font menu. It is also available when defining style sheets that are included in your project.

Font sets are saved with a project. If you create a new project, you must also create new font sets for it. These are lists of the standard system fonts, which should be available on all operating system versions.

Recommended Font Sets

* Arial, Helvetica, Sans-serif
* Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-serif
* Times New Roman, Times, Serif
* Courier New, Courier, Mono

After you declare the font set, you use the font set name in place of the font name when setting up your style sheet. (yes, it should appear among the list of fonts)

And finally (just in case you are unaware of this feature) you can easily apply the modified style sheet by clicking the Topics tab, selecting all the topics (Ctrl+A) right clicking and choosing Properties off the context menu. Once you do this, click the Appearance tab and choose the style sheet to apply.

Hopefully this helps... Rick

[annmic]

The fonts in the tables of my topics all look larger than the body above and below it. I have gone into the WSIWIG and clicked inside the table and on the body. The fonts and font size are the same. I have all my topics set to the same style sheet.(MS_Help) I have also highlighted all text in each tables and set it to the same font size as the body. Still the font size in the tables look larger.I realize that a previous suggestion was to perhaps open the style sheet in notepad. If this is what I need to do I am not sure I am not clear on the steps to do this. I believe I open notepad outside of Robohelp. If this is what I need to do could someone be kind enough to give me step-by step directions on how to do it? Also, I see in the Truecode editor some generated code with a different font and font size but there is a warning in the comment box not to touch the code. I am wondering if this isn't what we are seeing in the tables.

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi annmic. If you have found a different font and size in the truecode then that's your problem. The warning about editing the truecode is just telling people that don't know what they're doing to stay away! If you are happy to change the font and size, then go right ahead. I'd take a backup of your project first just to on the safe side.

[MergeThis]

Let's try clearing up some things (spaces added to GT and LT for this forum):

As Rick said, it's Arial=Windows, Helvetica=Mac. You can set up font families if you want to, but you could simply add Arial to the example I've shown (Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;), so that the Webhelp finds whatever sans-serif font is available on the user's machine, in order from left to right.

When we say edit the TrueCode, we're talking about editing the topic HTM files by selecting the TrueCode tab at the lower right of the RH topic pane.

When we say edit the CSS file, we mean to open it in Notepad or some other plain text editor (NOT WORD or any other binary editor!).

There should be no need to "highlighted all text in each tables and set it to the same font size as the body." What is needed is to REMOVE any info on font size, weight, color, etc. Otherwise, your styles just get ignored.

The WARNING not to edit THIS SECTION in the CSS file can be ignored as long as you're careful to make the same changes as you've made in the upper section. For example, if you change "color: #000000;" to "color: #000080;" in the P style, you must also change it in that restricted section (which RH uses to control how things will look with different browsers). That is, everything I've marked with the vertical bar at the left margin applies to the default paragraph style (when you use the < P > tag).

Any style information placed within the < HEAD > section of the current topic WILL SUPERCEDE your external style (which is called in the < link rel="StyleSheet" href="Ms_Help.css" > line in the < HEAD > section of the current topic).

Extra style information provided at the point of interest WILL SUPERCEDE the external style sheet AND the styles in the < HEAD > section of the current topic. (This is the cascading effect in the Cascading Style Sheet).

In the two examples at the bottom of the code samples, the < SPAN > tag and the < B > and < I > tags WILL SUPERCEDE the bodytext and table text classes (whether they've been assigned in an external or internal style section). Therefore, no amount of style work will be effective if your topics are riddled with this type of filth, which has usually accumulated over several years by several writers who wouldn't know a style if it ran them over, and then doesn't get cleaned up when the topic gets imported into a RoboHelp project (it actually gets made worse).

[mjp_321]

I am using Robohelp 7 and I had exactly the same problem.

Easy fix.

1. Select the table
2. Change the font size.
3. Change back to the original size.

You have to do every table.