WebHelp Skin Woes

[mamarachel]

I am struggling with the following problems in the WebHelp skin. Your suggestions would be deeply appreciated! See attached screen shot.

1. The toolbar icons have disappeared and the logo that I inserted in place of the MadCap logo also doesn't appear.

2. Where do I customize the gradient for the rectangle below the Search button?

3. Where do I customize the frame borders that are currently grey?

[lacastle]

1. Did you accidentally turn off the tool bar or remove all of the icons? That is on the WebHelp Toolbar tab of the skins stylesheet. My only other thought for this one would be maybe the logo you used to replace the MadCap logo is mostly white and too big so it covered up the whole toolbar.

2. This rectangle is called the IconTray in the AccordionItem section of the skins stylesheet. (for example, in Flare itself, when you have too many accordion items to show up on their own lines, little icons show up in the bottom rectangle.) However you choose to customize the gradient for the other accordion items is the same for IconTray.

3. I don't know if the frame borders can be modified. If they could, I would assume that it would be in the Frame section of the skin stylesheet, but i don't think that option is there. I guess they wouldn't show up if you had the same color as a background next to it (like the MadCap Knowledgebase top frame border).

[mamarachel]

Hi Laura,
Thank you for your help. See some comments below.

1. Did you accidentally turn off the tool bar or remove all of the icons? That is on the WebHelp Toolbar tab of the skins stylesheet. My only other thought for this one would be maybe the logo you used to replace the MadCap logo is mostly white and too big so it covered up the whole toolbar.
I don't have them turned off. I have Enable Custom Layout and Exclude Accordian Title checked and four icons in the left-hand column. The toolbar height is set to 45 pixels and the logo is smaller than that.

2. This rectangle is called the IconTray in the AccordionItem section of the skins stylesheet. (for example, in Flare itself, when you have too many accordion items to show up on their own lines, little icons show up in the bottom rectangle.) However you choose to customize the gradient for the other accordion items is the same for IconTray.
This is fine now.

3. I don't know if the frame borders can be modified. If they could, I would assume that it would be in the Frame section of the skin stylesheet, but i don't think that option is there. I guess they wouldn't show up if you had the same color as a background next to it (like the MadCap Knowledgebase top frame border).
That's where I looked for it and couldn't find it either.

[NorthEast]

1. The toolbar icons have disappeared and the logo that I inserted in place of the MadCap logo also doesn't appear.

There was a bug in the first version of Flare 3.0 that meant all of the icons disappeared from the toolbar if you included any custom buttons of your own. If you're using the latest update that'll be fixed though.

3. Where do I customize the frame borders that are currently grey?

You cannot set the frameset borders within Flare (or your skin/stylesheet). To modify these you need to edit the file(s) in the output than include the frameset definition - by default this will be called Default.htm.

You can find plenty of info on the web about how to modify the frameset styles. It it will take a bit of effort though unless you really like fiddling about with HTML and CSS (I gave up as I couldn't get it how I wanted to look in both IE and Firefox).

[ed_d]

I only have to use IE7, so I got rid of those gray frames (3) by modifying "Default.htm"

Change frameborder to "0" in the following line:
<frame name="body" frameborder="1" src="Skin/Blank.htm" />

To make it permanent, I'm assuming you could do the same thing in the "Default.htm" file in your program files.

[QBF]

The toolbar icons have disappeared and the logo that I inserted in place of the MadCap logo also doesn't appear.

Did you enter or modify an OnClick script? From hard won experience, I learned that scripts in the Onclick must be properly structured or the icons on the toolbar vanish (this behavior was verified by Madcap Support).

[Lalitharaman]

Hi,

The toolbar icons have disappeared and the logo that I inserted in place of the MadCap logo also doesn't appear.

I am facing the same problem with one of my projects.I have not nodified any script and I am using MadCap version 3.1.0. What can be done to onercome this issue?

regards,
Lalitha

[NorthEast]

Presumably it was working at one point, so did you make any changes to the skin?

[Richard Ferrell]

If you add a new skin and use one of the default skins does the toolbar appear?

[LTinker68]

And if you have MOTW enabled but the output is on a web server, not your local machine, then parts of the screen won't be visible when viewed in IE. Does the toolbar appear if you view the help in Firefox? If it does, and you're putting the help on the web server, then disable MOTW and rebuild the project and upload it to the server.

[Lalitharaman]

Thanks for the responses.

- The earlier target was HTML. I generated WebHelp for the first time using a custom skin. In skin editor, the preview is perfect so I thought that there is some issue with the target. I deleted the target and tried to generate WebHelp with first default skin and then with a custom skin but all outputs showed the same issue.

- MOTW is not enabled.

Lalitha

[Richard Ferrell]

I would recommend that you open a support ticket then.

https://www.madcapsoftware.com/support/contact.aspx

[LTinker68]

By any chance, did you use your own custom images for the toolbar icons? Below are details I submitted in a bug report regarding the "Tooltip" and "Label" fields for the icons. I don't know if they're also issues with IE7.

If you put a space in the “Tooltip” field for the custom icon, then the entire toolbar is blown out when the compiled help is viewed in IE6. If you leave the “Tooltip” field set to “(not set)”, then the toolbar displays fine. Also, if you put a space in the “Label” field, then there is a much larger gap in the toolbar where that icon goes (i.e., 100px is reserved for an icon that’s only 12px). If you put a period in the “Label” field, then the correct amount of space is used for the icon. Note that both these problems don’t occur in Firefox.