Left Indent Setting for List Styles Not Retained

[Guest]

More fun with styles. Here's an odd problem: I have a Note style in FrameMaker, all nice, looks great. I set the properties in fmstyles.css for the Note (32px left indent, -24px text indent). When I bring in my FM book, or even just Update All, the left margin for my Note style now has 8px set for the left indent. I didn't change it; who did?

When I bring up the Styles dialog (Format > Styles) and select my Note style, the settings I see are correct. However, when I click Format> Paragraph from within the Styles dialog, the left indent is 8px and the actual Note in my topic is not left-aligned to the correct distance (32px). I've gone into the fmstyles.css and made sure all the units were pixels; I've exited the project and then opened the project up and tried to update again and still the same left indent problem.

My fmstyles.css file is attached.

Now to make this even MORE of a mystery, when I right-click my main book in the RH Project Manager and select Properties, and get to the Style Mappings, and enter Styles for my Note style, the left indent NOW says -16px! Where did THAT come from?

Has anybody seen this kind of odd behavior in their own work? This feels a lot like a bug, or maybe I'm missing a step. Any help would be appreciated because every time I update, I have to manually go back in and change my left indent for a bunch of styles.

By the way, I'm seeing this in all of my numbered list and bullet list styles. And I edit the fmstyles.css file in Dreamweaver outside of RH.

[JainVivek]

Have you checked - "Convert Autonumber to HTML lists" in import settings and not selected the paragraph in "Ignore Autonumber".

[Guest]

quote:

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Originally posted by: JainVivek
Have you checked - "Convert Autonumber to HTML lists" in import settings and not selected the paragraph in "Ignore Autonumber".

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No, I do not have that option checked.

[Guest]

In the interim, my work-around solution is to manually set the left indent property for the affected styles in the Paragraph settings accessed from within the Styles Mapping dialog before bringing in my FrameMaker book or updating all. I would like this to work automatically.

[JainVivek]

I read your post again "I edit the fmstyles.css file in Dreamweaver outside of RH" - that's probably the reason list style mapping is causing issues. RoboHelp currently maintains two styles for lists - one for the paragraph content and other for the numbering/bullets....

[Guest]

Right, but all of my list styles are using the P tag versions, not the LI versions (from the fmstyles.css). Is this necessary and would I get better results if I used the LI tags, and how would I do this?

[JainVivek]

Adobe RoboHelp 7 creates two styles for list style - one is <p> tag, other is <li> tag. Instead of managing this in DreamWeaver, I suggest you edit the CSS in RoboHelp through the User Interface and let RoboHelp manage this on its own.

[Guest]

Follow-up question:

We have two writers using RH on two different computers. We work on different FM/RH projects, but we need to use the same styles. If we use RH's GUI to modify the fmstyles.css styles, do both writers have to do this separately for their own projects or is there some way to share the CSS modifications so only one person has to do it?

[JainVivek]

You should be able to copy fmstyles.css from one machine to another. Make one machine as master - all edits happen on that machine and you copy the fmstyles.css to the other machine.