MadCap Software Forums

I tried searching for this, but since the forum's search won't use "styles" "apply" or "topics," I needed to create a new one.

My project is applying all styles from the primary stylesheet when I modify the styles directly in the project. If I modify then in notepad, however, it always works.

Am I missing something? Why is it sometimes applying my styles and not at other times?

Flare doesn't actually apply the stylesheet -- that is, add a reference to it -- until you build the output. If you're in the authoring environment, then Flare is rendering the topic with the (project) stylesheet, but it's not until you build the output that the reference is actually inserted into the topic's page code.

Sorry if my verbage isn't correct, but even when I build the output, the styles aren't being applied to topics. Again, if I edit the stylesheet manually, it works, but not if I edit it in MadCap Flare.

Are you using an imported stylesheet, or is this one from scratch that you started in Flare? has it always not worked? did you make sure the target was pointing to the correct stylesheet?

Yeah, it's the only stylesheet attached to the project, and I've made sure that it explicitly points to the entire project.

It's an imported stylesheet, and some of the formatting works while some doesn't.

is it the original formatting that works, or the formatting specifically created with Flare's style editor?

The original formatting works, but the rest is kind of random. For example, when I adjust the space between the lines in the paragraph tab of the style editor, that works, but not fonts, colors, etc. When I change fonts in html, that works.

Is your stylesheet so big that you can't redo the whole thing using Flare styles? Sometimes I think it's better/cleaner to start from scratch for these types of things.
I know with CSS it makes a difference the order that the styles are applied/edited. Are you making changes in the CSS, or inline style changes?

I'm making them in CSS, but I can try to just create a new stylesheet and see how that works.

I tried creating a new stylesheet, and that didn't work. Then I tried created an entirely new, blank project and modifying the style sheet and that still didn't work. Specifically, I tried modifying the h1 background to be a blue, but it didn't apply. I also tried to adjust the font family for the style sheet, and it wasn't applied either.

Is it only on your computer or on every computer viewing the output? And is the output WebHelp? If it is WebHelp, it could be that the browser has been set to use a stylesheet or specific styles, which will override the stylesheet in the project. You could also try it in a different browser.

did you change the h1 background color like this?
i just opened a new sample project and changed the h1 and it worked.

Yeah, Laura, that's how I changed the background. And I just regenerated the output and opened it on a different computer, and it still didn't show up correctly.

Something to try ...

Look at the stylesheet with a text editor and check if there is more than one entry for H1 - and either group them together or remove the ones not required. In early versions of Flare, the Flare editor created separate entries when you updated a style attribute. From a "cascading" point of view this should not matter, but there were problems with subsequent edits as the changes weren't always applied to the entry that affected the topic layout. An imported stylesheet that's gone through many editors could have entries all over the place.

I don't know if this is a bit obvious, but if you're not seeing any style changes that you set in the Flare stylesheet editor, have you checked what the medium it is set to? It's normally set as Medium: (default), but if it's set to a different medium (like print), then that would explain why you're not seeing any style changes in the help output.

Having the same problem: newly created style not appearing in output.

Don't you love the byzantine nature of Flare? Thankfully, our org will be adopting to a new, more modern authoring platform soon that doesn't rely on the writer to know HTML code, or all the unnecessary idiosyncrasies of Flare (and focusing more on writing than spending hours trying to understand the Flare's confoundingly peculiar algorithms and user interface).

Close Flare, delete the Analyzer folder and restart Flare. I know, I know -- Have you tried turning it off and then turning it back on?
That's always my first action, and it does work some of the time. If it helps, we have been seeing some of the same sort of behaviors. It feels like it takes time for Flare to 'catch up' with changes. We're also seeing things like cross-references not updating automatically.

If it's about the style you mention in this post for a third-level numbered list, then it'll help to provide an example of your CSS in that post:
viewtopic.php?p=147353#p147353