creating styles

[luviola10]

I'm an experienced RH8 user, but I still struggle with getting styles set up and to work. Right now I'm trying to create some character styles because I don't want to use inline styles, per Kevin Siegel's RH8 book. specifically I've created a style for a Result and then I try to apply it by selecting text and nothing happens. I've been searching Peter Grainge's website for info on styles but coming up empty. Can someone refer me somewhere specifically?

[AlbusTeck]

Hey Luviola

Could you please take following steps:

1. Open the topic in design editor

2. Select the text to which you want to apply style

3. Click Format menu from the top menu bar and choose styles..

4. It should open the Styles and Formatting Pod

5. From there you can choose your desired styles

Please let me know if this works for you or not.

Thanks.

[AlbusTeck]

Also if you want to create customer styles, then do following:

1. go to the project folder, look for the file with .css extension and open that in notepad.

2. There you can define the styles such as

SPAN.resulttext

{

font-style: italic;

font-family: arial;

color: #00ff00;

font-size: 12px;

}

3. Then go to inside RoboHelp and do above steps.

Let me know if you have any query.

[RoboAsh]

Exactly How are you creating the character styles, the best way is to do it through style POD (Format->Styles) and from the first button you can create any styles and use it in the associated topics, or else you have the freedom of always creating character styles directly in the style sheet (.css file) but in this case what might be going wrong is that you might have created the style in one CSS but that is not associated to the topic in which you are using this style, we should associate the CSS to the topic (can be verified from the assign style sheet or create New combo in the formatting tool bar)

Hope this helps

Ashish

[luviola10]

Thanks for your help, Ashish.

I guess I want to know the best procedure for the following. I am using the

default .css and I am able to create new styles within the default. Should I

be doing that or naming the .css something new besides default? So I tried

just adding new styles to the default .css I inherited with the project.

Thanks,

Gloria

[AlbusTeck]

You can create new stylesheet for your own custom styles, but make sure classes are unique. It will help you to find styles created by you.

So once you create a new style sheet, you can attach that style sheet in the topic properties and then use styles from the style pod.

Let me know if you still have any queries.

[luviola10]

So can I just customize the default already started? Wouldn't this be

easier? It seems to work as long as I update the default css on the topic

properties after I've made changes.

[RoboAsh]

HI Gloria,

           You can very well use the default,css in the RoboHelp project, it would be safer if you create new para/char/list etc styles through UI or else you can also directly type the style in the default.css file using a notepad or any text editor. the only caution is to use unique style names (style name like mystyle and MyStyle should not be used together - note the case difference).

I am not clear about your statement "It seems to work as long as I update the default css on the topic properties after I've made changes" as If you do not have any other CSS in the Project then for all the new topics created default.css is the only style sheet that is used by default.

For Imported topics the case is different - in such topics the when you apply another CSS (like default.css) the style names applied in the topic (see the HTML code) should match the style names (the names should not differ even with respect to case) defined in the default.css.

   If the names of the style used does not match the stlyes defined in the style sheet applied the topic will not show up correctly

Hope this helps

Ashish