Custom skin for Robohelp 2020

Report · Aug 31, 2022

Is it possible to edit skins outside the skin editor, or make custom ones to import? I thought I remember seeing something about using SASS to do so on one of the pages when I first started using Robohelp last year, but I was focused on learning the basics and pdf outputs at the time. I do 99% of my formatting in Robohelp using the code pages for the HTML and CSS, and am finding trying to use the Skin Editor very frustrating. I would prefer to do it in the code.

Ideally I would prefer to edit an already created skin as there are only minor tweaks I want to do, mostly moving moving buttons inside associated containers to simplify positioning.

Report · Aug 31, 2022

SASS was for a specific Classic version so doesn't apply for RH New UI .

Adobe doesn't really seem to want users doing anything with skins beyond CSS and possibly custom javsascript changes. The User Assets section is for these custom files. Custom css determined by examining the output using browser developer tools can achieve quite a lot of tweaks.

If you're determined you could look at the following.

In certain scenarios for certain skins a layoutDiff.css file is generated in the skin folder that I believe that can be modified although I couldn't say when or if it might be overwritten by an update. It should contain most of the style names used in the skin and any customisations made in the editor (I think).

There are ejs files in the same folder that contain some html and you could try modifying some of that, but I consider it both risky in terms of breaking something, and at risk of being overwritten by updates to RH. A lot of the stuff seems to be written in either during generation or at runtime from javascript.

You might be able to find some seed files in the Robohelp installation directory, but those are basically guaranteed to be overwritten by updates.

One other thought is to use the Post Generation Scripts feature to make modifications to the output using scripts. You'd need a developer's help but if it's important to your business this might be an option.