RoboHelp 8 - CSS file triples size on generate

[Guest]

I've created a custom CSS file for use with our help projects, which is approximately 12KB. The CSS is valid through the W3C validator.

In many of the projects, the stylesheet doubles and triples in size when I generate. This morning, it's turned into a 58KB file! For some reason, it seems to be duplicating attributes for each style; for example:

body {
      margin:0;
      padding:0;
      border:0;
      font-size:100%;
      font:inherit;
      vertical-align:baseline;
      line-height:1;
      width:80%;
      font-size:12px;
      margin:3px 0px 0px 100px;
      font-family:Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
      line-height:16px;
      color:#000;
      background-color:#fff;
      margin:0;
      padding:0;
      border:0;
      font-size:100%;
      font:inherit;
      vertical-align:baseline;
      line-height:1;
      width:80%;
      font-size:12px;
      margin:3px 0px 0px 100px;
      font-family:Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
      line-height:16px;
      color:#000000;
      background-color:#ffffff;
}

Any thoughts why this may be happening? The output is FlashHelp, and "Apply to all topics" is not selected.

[Willam_van_Weelden]

Hi,

RoboHelp 7 and 8 do some processing on your style sheets. (Robo 9 probably does too, but I'll have to check that.) Normally this is not a problem as the styling of your project is mostly unaffected. When you use the RH style editor, it's not a problem. But when you manually edit your css, RoboHelp may parse your css. For example, when you combine multiple selectors:

p, ul, ol { font-size: 12px; }

RH will turn this into three statements. If you use more complex selectors such as + and >, RoboHelp may incorrectly interpret this. I think this is a bug, but I've never given it much thought. I always copy my original style sheets into the output.

Greet,

Willam

[Guest]

That's kind of frustrating. What I find is that when I copythe CSS file to a folder, it automatically goes from 12->26K. Then on generation, it explodes even larger. The problem is that it's knocking out some of my styling, particularly the :before attribute I'm using on H2 and H3 (h2:before).

If I was a solo writer, then copying over the CSS each time we generate files wouldn't be a problem, but I'm working on a team with two other people.

[MergeThis]

Are you aware that the pseudo-elements ::before and ::after are not supported for IE 7 or earlier?

We thought we were safe, since our app supports only IE 8 and above; however, these pseudo-elements are not supported if IE 8 is being viewed in Compatibility View (displayed as if you were using an earlier version of Internet Explorer, per the MS IE Help). Be advised, and test, test, test!

Good luck,

Leon

[Guest]

Ohhh, I know! I've learned a ton about IE8 incompatibilities since I've taken this project on. Simple, pure HTML and CSS drop-down menu? Not possible with IE8.

Like you, the company has standardized on IE8, and our help projects are only viewed on the Intranet, so I'm somewhat safe there. I have tested on both IE8 and Firefox, which are the only two available here.

Thanks for the head's up!

-=Ed.