CSS files / style sheets changing on their own..

[ekcochran]

Hi all -

Lately something sort of weird has been happening when I'm editing topics in Robohelp. Today I was pasting some information from a Word doc into my topic and a prompt came up. It said that my stylesheets had been changed, and asked if I wanted to reflect the changes on all pages or just the one I was editing. I clicked Yes (normally this isn't a big deal, as nothing happens) but today it bolded ALL the Body text.

I'll confess I'm not terribly familiar with Robohelp yet - I've only been using it since I got my current job about three months ago. InDesign is more my thing, but since the principles are similar I'm okay. Can anyone explain the techie side to me as to why this might keep happening? I don't touch the stylesheets at all, much less when I'm in the middle of editing something unrelated. I lost the formatting I did and really don't want to go through it again.

Thanks!

Erin

[Peter Grainge]

Welcome to the forum Erin

What I think has happened is that whatever you were pasting had a style whose name matched something already in your CSS. However the style definition was different so RoboHelp asked you whether you wanted to change the style you had to the new one or whether you wanted to keep the RoboHelp style and apply it to what you were bring in. I think you made the wrong choice. There's no Undo but you can fix the problem.

Open the Style Editor pod and you will see your styles. Right click any style that is wrong and edit it to correct. You should find it easier than you think.

Come back here if you have any problems.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[ekcochran]

I know how to undo the changes that were made to the CSS (which I did), so that part is at least fixed. This is the first time it's happened when pasting something *in* to Robohelp that was totally outside of the program, in this case MS Word. I've gotten this prompt already while only working in Robohelp and simply using the styles previously defined in the CSS. I'll just be working and receive a prompt to change the styles out of the blue.

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

I believe one of the changes in RoboHelp 9 was that when pasting content copied from applications such as Microsoft Word, RoboHelp attempts to match the style. As you can see, that's not always even desired. I know in Microsoft applications (I'm a heavy PowerPoint user) when I right-click and the context menu appears, one of my paste options is to paste as unformatted text. I believe that's what we really need the dev team to give us.

The thing is, they aren't likely to make any changes to the behavior unless they hear from us. Lots of us. So I would encourage you and anyone else reading this thread to complete a Wish form to ask for this capability. (Link is in my sig) That's likely why we saw this change emerge.

So what to do until we see this added to RoboHelp?

You can perform a side trip. Open Windows Notepad. When you copy from Word, paste into Notepad. Then copy from Notepad and paste into RoboHelp. That will strip out any unwanted styling code.

You might also want to install a small helper application that allows you to do it. One such application is called PureText and you can read more about it and download it from the link below:

Click here to visit the PureText site

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7, 8 or 9 within the day! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

FYI Rick – there’s already a way to tweak FM (in the maker.ini) to give you the raw text when you do a Paste from things like Word; extremely handy if you do a lot of copy/paste work