Need recommendations on customizing RH2022 Azure-Blue

[Jamil29463960jwf2]

I am using Azure-Blue skin of RH2022  and the output as is has serious problems as I just noted in other posts. I may need to reset the app or its preferences as this seems a most unsual behavior. In any case, before I spend great amount of time hunting down this problem, I ended up facing other issues where I need to customize this skin, but not using the limited RH 2022 user interface dialog-guided skin customization options. It turns out that for the HTML5 output, RH2022 is copying a file "layout.css" from its own directory and placing it in the template/Azure-Blue directory of the output. So modifying this file, quickly solved a big part of the problem. But, this layout.css file is not in my project directory. How do I add it to my project, as the permenant new skin css? Where do I pace it so that RH 2022 will use it, and not use its own "layout.css" from its own directory?

[Peter Grainge]

The layout.css file in the output is created by RoboHelp when you generate. RoboHelp looks at all the customisations you have made in the UI and creates that file. The template users see is a combination of the default settings and the customisations. If you copied it to  your project, during generation it would just get recreated with what is in the UI. Thus that is not your solution.

I am not 100% sure that what follows is correct but give it a try. If it doesn't work you would stop adding the file I refer to. I have asked someone with more knowledge of this method to take a look.

What you can do is write your customisations into a CSS with any name you care to give it. Then you add that to the template.

What then happens is the RoboHelp first applies the customisations in the template editor and the applies your CSS.

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My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

[Jamil29463960jwf2]

Excellent suggestion! Thank you.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

The other quick & dirty way is to get your layout.css file with all the stuff you want it to have, back it up & copy it back into your output post-generation. 

[Jamil29463960jwf2]

Works, but I am trying to avoid this method 🙂 . Has Anyone else encountered this problem. I dont like to reset preferences files, or reinstall, but if it is a lone case, than I may need to llok into this. Beyond that, I think Peter's answer is the proper  method for such customizations.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Test his suggestion out - it should work as long as your custom CSS file is referenced after the main layout.css - then your definitions will be the last ones defined and applied to the HTML. You can check the output to see that your CSS comes after the layout.css one.

[Amebr]

Peter is correct, and you should put your customisations in your own css file and add that css file in the User Assets section of the skin.

I would personally avoid copying the full css from the output, and only put the necessary differences in my custom css. Copying the full css probably won't break anything, but it will likely make it harder to make change in future as you will need to change a lot of places rather than only the necessary places.

There are some skins that add a "layoutdiff.css"  file after you make certain changes, which Adobe staff have said is fine to change (again, making the minimal changes in order to allow the cascading part of cascading style sheets to take effect). However, I don't think Azure Blue is one of these.