Font color in preview is correct but black in pdf

[kozchris]

Just learning Flare and love it so far but I am running into some issues with building a pdf. I have the latest Flare v4.2.

I have topics that use the heading1, heading 2 and heading 3 styles all of which have a blue font color. When I preview the doc or look at it in the editor the font color is correct. When I build the target pdf the initial heading 1 in a chapter is blue but all other headings are black.

Anyone know what I could be missing?

Thanks,
C

[iand]

Hi, does the same thing happen if you try to build html Webhelp from the same files? The Preview is not a very reliable guide, unfortunately. If you get the same problem with Webhelp it suggests a stylesheet problem.

[LTinker68]

There are two views to the XML Editor and two mediums in the Stylesheet Editor. Well, there are actually three mediums and you can create more, but the two you'll use the most are "default" and "print". When the XML Editor (in v4) is set to web layout, then you're looking at the "default" medium styles from the stylesheet. When the XML Editor is set to print layout, then you're looking at the "print" medium first, with backup from the "default" medium. That is, if a style isn't defined in the print medium, then it takes its value from the "default" medium.

So, check your stylesheet in both default and print mediums to see what colors are specified for h1, h2, etc. You probably have one set to blue and the other set to black.

[doc_guy]

Also check the code to see if the Heading is part of a link or some other nested style. Consider the following code:

<h1><a href="someTopic.htm">My Heading</a></h1>

If your style tells H1s to be black, but your style tells As to be blue, then the blue color will be applied because it happens after the H1 is declared, and the color of the child element overrides the color of the parent element.

Does that make sense?

[kozchris]

Both mediums are set to have the style with a blue color. I went to the style sheet and switched between the mediums to confirm this. The heading text is not nested inside another tag. It is <h1><a>bookmark</a>heading</h1> which shouldn't be a problem.

The chm output does have the headers in blue though.

[LTinker68]

Try moving the <a>bookmark</a> to before the opening <h1> tag. So it would be <a>bookmark</a><h1>heading</h1>. Actually, it would probably be <a name="bookmark"></a><h1>heading</h1>.

[Eileen]

Just a thought here...Your problem may be simpler than an issue in your actual source files...
Is your default printer set to a color printer? I seem to remember that if your default printer is not a color printer, then when you preview the target.pdf, it previews in black and white. (I can't test this at the moment.) When you actually print from your target.pdf file, do you see the appropriate colors?

[kozchris]

Thanks for the suggestions.

Moving the bookmark element out of the header did not help.

Using a color printer and printer is setup to print in color. I did not try printing out the pdf, I'll need to get back on that.

[LTinker68]

Can you post the styles from the stylesheet for that tag, both the default medium and the print medium versions? A lot of time there turns out to be a conflict in the style that causes something to not work.

Also, while you're doing that and you have the stylesheet open in the Internal Text Editor, do a find for all instances of the h1 tag. You might have it defined twice in the default medium with two different colors but defined once in the print medium.

[kozchris]

I reimported my framemaker book and used the unmodified stylesheet from the project that was not working and the problem cleared itself up.

I must have had a setting tweaked.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.