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heath_huff
Known Participant
February 19, 2009
Question

Use of a style sheet external to the help project

  • February 19, 2009
  • 6 replies
  • 1015 views
Is there a way I can use a style sheet external to the help project (i.e., the CSS that govers our web portal UI) to apply styles to the topics in my help project? Ideally our development team would maintain one cascade of style sheets for our web portals that would also apply to our help topics. Any ideas?
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6 replies

Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 19, 2009
Trial and error.

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heath_huffAuthor
Known Participant
February 19, 2009
So as long as I keep the style sheet empty save for my @import rule, I should be okay?
Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 19, 2009
It is not an identical copy, there are some tweaks that are designed to make the content look the same in other browsers. In reality it is more a case of as close as possible.

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Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 19, 2009
By default RH7 creates two CSS files in the output to deal with different browsers. Check this method is OK in all relevant browsers. I am not saying it will not be, just that as you are changing the way RH works, you need to check that too.

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heath_huffAuthor
Known Participant
February 19, 2009
Thanks for the heads up. I had already noticed default_ns.css . . . is that the only one? Is that always just a copy of default.css? In my case, I have an empty style sheet with a single @import statement, which so far has copied into default_ns.css in both test cases.
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heath_huffAuthor
Known Participant
February 19, 2009
Rick,

So far, my primitive test of the @import rule has worked. Provided that I can guarantee a qualified URL where my style sheet will live, I can import it into a blank default.css and have it applied to my topics. Now I just have to find away to keep authors from creating any other style sheets :-D
RoboColum_n_
RoboColum_n_
Legend
February 19, 2009
I don't think so heath_buff as the CSS is part of each HTM file published as part of your output. You may be able to replace the CSS file in your project output with that of your portal and change the references inside each of the output files to refer to it. It would be easier just to use the same style for the help and the portal. Is that an option?
Captiv8r
Captiv8r
Legend
February 19, 2009
Hi there

I'm not sure if it would work. It might as long as you don't use the RoboHelp HTML style editor to edit the CSS file.

You might try creating a CSS file in RoboHelp and hand editing it using Windows Notepad. Inside the file you would use the @import function to reference the central CSS.

More information on using this function is at This Link

Might not work with RoboHelp but would be worth a try.

Cheers... Rick
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heath_huffAuthor
Known Participant
February 19, 2009
Rick, thanks for the tip. I'll check out @import and see how that works.

To give you both a little background, since I often see your names on this forum, I'm building a brand new help project for a brand new product. I'm trying to make smart, scalable infrastructure decisions for the product and help project's future. Currently, I'm the only author, but in the future there will certainly be others.

I'm using RoboHelp 7 now, and considering the upgrade to RoboHelp 8. I also need to make decisions about source control and deployment, but those will be mostly made by our development and IT departments. Our product is written in Ruby, which RoboHelp does not provide API support for, and our development team would like to get away from IIS to serve up the pages of our web portal, which RoboHelp Server utilizes. So I'll probably have some more questions for you guys in the near future :-D

Any recommendations about upgrading to RoboHelp 8? Any suggestions for providing context sensitive help via Ruby on Rails?
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