Newbie question on stylesheet links

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JoeWeinmunson
Propeller Head
Posts: 22
Joined: Tue Oct 30, 2018 12:05 pm

Newbie question on stylesheet links

Post by JoeWeinmunson »

I am coming from a process where I was hand-coding HTML to write the Help file for our software. near the top of all files I had something like this block
<head><title>Printing a Container Placement Report</title>
<link href="styles.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
</head>
I'm guessing it's not necessary to include that line in all the topics I create in Flare because something in the program has already set which stylesheet I want to use--correct? Also, do I need to manually insert the header here or is that step unnecessary?
Nita Beck
Senior Propellus Maximus
Posts: 3667
Joined: Thu Feb 02, 2006 9:57 am
Location: Pittsford, NY

Re: Newbie question on stylesheet links

Post by Nita Beck »

A best practice is to associate the stylesheet at the target level, not at the topic level. (BTW, I am not talking about table stylesheets; they do get linked at the topic level.) That way, your topics are more "flexible" for use in different outputs. Occasionally you might need to link a topic to a specific stylesheet, in which case there is a target option to "Allow local stylesheets".

So, in short, no, you generally don't need to bother adding that stylesheet link to your topics.

(BTW, I see you've also got a title tag in the head. If you leave the title tag out completely, Flare will use a topic's first heading when it can't find a title. This is very handy if you ever edit a topic's first heading; you don't need to remember to edit the title tag. And if you ever have your stuff translated, you won't need to have the titles translated.)
Nita
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RETIRED, but still fond of all the Flare friends I've made. See you around now and then!
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