Please help! Managing multiple styles

[jenniferf]

Hi everyone,

I have just started a new job, where I have inherited a Flare project. This is my first time working in Flare (I am accustomed to working in DITA XML). I am having problems with the styles in the project and hope that the collective wisdom here can help me. Here's the scenario:

-The same content needs to be output under two different brands, each with their own colours, fonts, etc.
-To achieve this end, the previous writer created a whole lot of styles. For example, instead of using the default "p" for a paragraph, there is a style called "p.body" and instead of using "li" or "bulleted" for bulleted list items, there is a style called "p.bullet." Basically, there is a "p.<whatever>" style for everything---table entries, steps, figure headings, etc, and these are the styles that I am supposed to use.
-Using these styles seems to be a tedious manual process. For example, when I create a new topic, the pre-populated heading and paragraph use the default style, so I have to manually change these to apply the styles that I am supposed to use.
-The Styles menu seems to be context-sensitive, and sometimes when I am working in the new topic, my prescribed styles don't show up, and other times they do. I find that I have to insert something, and then edit it in the text editor before my prescribed styles display in the drop-down.
-The existing docs don't use the styles consistently. For example, the same table might contain a mix of styles, such as "table_body_left," "TableBodyLeft," "p.TableBody" etc. It appears that the styles have multiplied as people have applied formatting using a combination of styles and the icons in the editor to change alignment or indentation.

Here are my questions:
-I don't understand why the previous writer created new styles. What is the advantage? Why do I need these? Do I actually need these?
-Would it be possible to simply use the default styles and then define how they look in the CSS? And then have a separate CSS for each brand?
-If I can use the default styles and define them in the CSS, how do I go about cleaning up the multitude of styles that currently exist?

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Thanks,
Jennifer

[rogersm]

Hi Jennifer,

I am far from an expert, but my thoughts are below:

Some writers might like to create their own styles rather than customizing the defaults. In the case of list items, creating new styles might provide more flexibility than the defaults. However, it is perfectly fine to customize the default styles, which is what I do (so you could customize <p> instead of creating a p.body).

You could have a separate CSS for each brand or maybe even use one stylesheet with mediums (see http://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare201 ... ueries.htm)

You could use Find and Replace to clean up styles, although this plug-in for flare might be useful for that (although I have not used it): https://kaizenplugin.com/

thanks,
mark

[Psider]

Another reason for the individual styles might be because the project is very old and was originally imported from another tool, for example Robohelp. In earlier versions of that product, the only way of applying customised styles on bulleted and numbered paragraphs was to have a p.'mystylename' style. So the author may have continued as that was what they were used to.

It might also be that word documents have been imported at times, so you may have multiple stylesheets in the project, which could explain why you can't always select the style you need to.