Best practices for cleaning up an old CSS?

[Guest]

We have a legacy help system that we've put into RH 9.  Our CSS has a lot of old styles in it.  Is there a best practices document somewhere that we can use to learn how to clean up the CSS and remove old styles but still preserve the ones we want?

thanks...

[Peter Grainge]

I don't know of any such document but perhaps this will help.

First archive a copy of the CSS as it is now so that you can go back and retrieve anything that you later find you shouldn't have deleted.

Next you should be safe in deleting any styles you see with kadov in them. You will see they are duplicates of another style and were used for the way RoboHelp used to work.

The rest are a bit more difficult. You need to use the multifile find and replace tool to see if they are used in any topic. Then either change them to what you want now or leave them in the CSS.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[FirstScript]

We've been doing a style cleanup operation for our legacy documentation, and while it involves stepping through each help project, here's what has worked for us so far:

1. Create a copy of your CSS (best practice as Peter mentions, just in case you need to revert).
2. Remove any and all styles that you do not want in your help, retaining only the styles you plan to use.
3. Apply the modified CSS to your help projects.

Since we're performing an editorial review anyway for our documentation, we are able to check for any legacy content that has styles we want to do away with. It's easy to spot any style that is applied to text, but is not present in the CSS, because the style name appears in caps in the Styles drop-down. You may want to do that for your help projects too, just to make sure you're not retaining text that has unwanted styles.

- Richa