Styles and Cascading Style Sheets ??

[leannejamison]

We have existing many procedures in RH5X that we have created over the past two years. Our company has designed a new .css that contains new styles. Is there anyway to easily and quickly apply these new styles to our existing topics and projects?

[Peter Grainge]

In Windows Explorer, drop the style sheet into the root of the project.

Open the project in RH.

Select all files in the Topic list, press Ctrl A and then right click.

Select Properties and Appearance tab.

Select the new style sheet.

It will be applied to all topics.

OR just give it the same name as the old one and replace it using Windows Explorer.

[leannejamison]

I have done that. I can see the new styles in the drop-down list; however, they are not applied to the actual text in the topics. I have to select the text and re-apply the style to it. Are we going to have to do that on each topic???

[Peter Grainge]

Sounds like maybe the styles do not have exactly the same name OR some in line styles have been and still are getting in the way.

If the style names are exactly the same as before and if there are no embedded or inline styles, then changing the style sheet has to do the job. When it doesn't it must mean one of those things is not correct.

[leannejamison]

The new styles do have different names. So to be clear, unless we name the styles in the new css the same as in the previous css, we will have to manually apply the styles to content??? I am about to train about 75 people how to update their procedures in RoboHelp and I want to be sure there are no other options.

[Peter Grainge]

Look at it this way. Your old style sheet had two styles called black and white and the new one has red and green. How would RoboHelp know that for black you want red and for white, you want green?

I take it you cannot use the old style names to avoid this problem. One solution is doing it manually. There is another but it might not work so make sure you have a good backup, or two!

In your html you will find the styles look like this.

<p class="yourstylename">

You could do a multi file find and replace to change that to

<p class="yournewstylename">

With things like lists though it might not be perfect so it wil require a lot of testing.

I am also curious that you have 75 RoboHelp licences to keep procedures up to to date. It sounds like an expensive operation. Just seems unusual. I would have expected these people to feed into a smaller team but maybe there's more to it.

[leannejamison]

Well, I tried that and everything always reverts to Times New Roman. I think I am going to give up on this for now.

You are right, we have spent a lot of time and $$ on this project. We have many licenses and are in the process of purchasing more (they are slightly cheaper since the Adobe buy-out). All of our company administrative procedures, ISO Quality Manual, Divison, Department and Program Procedures as well as individual Work Instructions are done in RoboHelp and published on our Intranet. That involves about 20 departments with different administrators and secretaries creating and modifying. We have found it best if each group maintains their own Project.

We love the end product that RoboHelp helps us produce!

Thank you for your help.

[Peter Grainge]

"Well, I tried that and everything always reverts to Times New Roman. I think I am going to give up on this for now."

I suspect that it is something quite simple. Email me via my site. I have an idea.

[Peter Grainge]

Leanne

I replied to your email but heard nothing. I'll leave it that you will reply whenever you want to pick this up again.

[leannejamison]

I did not receive the email. I was hoping your idea would work. I will email again.

[Peter Grainge]

I'm not sure what you emailing again will achieve. I got your email, the problem is you are not getting any from me and I have sent two from different accounts.

Can you check you spam to see if they ended up there? Have you got an alternative address I can try?

[sstewart-lbmx]

Leanne -- Here's what I suggest for completely replacing a style sheet. It's a bit of a workaround, but it might help you:

Go into your project folder.

Locate the style sheet, and open it in a text editor. (Make a copy of it so you can revert later if something goes wrong.)

Select all the text in the existing style sheet and delete it.

Open your new style sheet in your text editor.

Copy the text out of the new style sheet and paste it into the old style sheet.

Save the old style sheet under the same name.

You *should* find this replaces the existing styles with new ones, although, as always, your mileage may vary.

[Peter Grainge]

The problem is not hooking up to the new style sheet, it is the fact that the styles have new names. Thus when the html looks in the style sheet for MyStyle, it is not there, we have MyNewStyle instead.

Leanne could rename the styles in the style sheet but she and her successors would have to do that every time they are issued with an update.

Better to do multi file find and replace to get the HTML to map to the new style sheet.