Prevent Robohelp from adding styles in stylesheet

[a_David]

Hi,

I'm frustrated over the fact that Robohelp keeps adding CSS classes to the html and styles in the CSS stylesheet when adding compontents like a bullet list and so on. Is it possible to disable this?

Our company is trying out Robohelp and my part as a designer is to create a number of pre-defiened styles for our editors to use in order to maintain a solid design. So I don't want Robohelp auto-adding it's own styles as soon as an editor adds a bullet list or anything else for that matter. In the long run this will clutter up the available styles and the editors won't know what styles to use.

[Peter Grainge]

It works the way it does to give maximum customisability to non technical users. Customisation changes through the UI and that does what it needs to. There is no option to disable it but there is nothing to force you use the built-in editor. That said, making the styles work while you are designing will be a whole lot easier in the RoboHelp editor. If you use another editor, the CSS must be strictly CSS3 compliant. To the best of my knowledge provided it is compliant, the CSS will only be changed if an editor customises something. 

In the Classic versions you could specify a third party editor but many of them don't understand the strict CSS3 RoboHelp 2019 and 2020 use. I tried using Top Style, an old but excellent editor. It proved very difficult to edit a style outside the RoboHelp UI. Indeed, editing the new versions in the RoboHelp editor at code level requires advanced skills.

Overall though, if there were an option, what do you intend should happen when the RoboHelp users need another style? If you want more than one bullet or numbered list, it has to be using classes. It sounds more like you don't want them adding styles and that is something to enforce internally.

I hope I have understood what you want to achieve. There is an option to not allow inline styling to be applied if that helps. However, your editors could deselect it.

________________________________________________________
See www.grainge.org for free Authoring and RoboHelp Information

[a_David]

Sure thing, and that's great. All I'm saying this is not a very sturdy method if you do have technical knowledge available. Would be nice if both needs could be meet, at least somewhat.

Of course we could enforce our editors NOT to use the toolbar options when creating content and use the appropiate style instead, but I could bet some money that this will happen. Is there any way of custimizing the toolbar options? Using robohelp 2020.

Cheers!
David

[Amebr]

The complaint is that when you click the bullet or number icon, it auto-creates a new class in the stylesheet, "Disc", "Square", "UpperAlpha", etc, depending on which type of bullet or number you select. That means there will then be an additional style for the user to select from if they need to change the bullet or list style. Correct?

As Peter says, this is so that non-technical authors can use the tool without knowing anything (much) about CSS.

In terms of the immediate issue, I think, at least in the short term, education to not use "x, y z styles" is the main option. The list of pre-determined classes should be fairly limited.

Or possibly there could be a feature request added to hide individual styles from the styles panel. Or maybe the dev boffins have much better ideas about how to implement easy to use but configurable list icons. 🙂

You can request features and report issues here: https://tracker.adobe.com/

Post the item number in the discussion so people can easily vote if they want the same functionality.

[a_David]

Exactly. Would like our pre-defined styles to be the only styles available, if needed we would add additional. I'm able to create rich looking content using CSS-styles and this works fine. My concern is that the style-list will be cluttered with additional styles in time make the content and workflow more error-prone in the end.

Would be nice if the toolbar options could be customized so that the editors simply don't have the option adding certain content from the toolbar thus removing the issue. Insted the editors have to use the appropiate pre-defiend style in the style-list.

Oh well, I guess I have to make it clear to our editors that they always have to use the appropiate styles when adding content, not the toolbar options.

Cheers!
David  

[Amebr]

Or, what about a dirty hack like this? It's not great but maybe it'll spark ideas.

ol.UpperAlpha:before {
    content: "Please change the style of this list to 'CorpLevelOneList'";
    color: red;
    font-size: large;
}

[a_David]

Hehe, dirty indeed! 😄 

[Stefan-Gentz]

Haha, I love that!

[D.Desmet]

I also had problems with the list styles of my RH10 CSS when I upgrading projects to RH2020. I had created the list styles with the RH10 styles editor. The CSS worked fine with RH10, but it seemed to be incompatible with RH2020. I did not get the same output without changing the RH10 CSS. The way how RH10 writes CSS code for lists is completely different from the way RH2020 does.

It was too difficult trying to get the CSS back on the RH2020 track, so I recreated the CSS from the default RH2020 project. At the end, that was an opportunity to have a new cleaned up CSS.

[Peter Grainge]

@a_David I thought your issue was how the CSS editor created its styles. I now read the issue is simply when styles are added using the toolbar. Hence my going off at a tangent.

I suspect a customisable toolbar is on the list but please use the link Amber has provided to add a feature request.

________________________________________________________
See www.grainge.org for free Authoring and RoboHelp Information