Find Style Dependencies?

[wvnomad]

Hey all,

Using Flare V5 and wanted to know if there is an easy way to see dependencies for the styles I created in the CSS.

I know there are styles I added when I intitially set up the project but that I'm no longer using. I want to remove them from the stylesheet so that other writers don't get confused about which style to select.

All of this goes back to when I was just learning CSS but before I found out about good CSS commenting. Go figure.

Anyway, any help you can provide would be awesome.

Jason

[NorthEast]

There's not a simple way, like checking the dependencies/links for topics.

You could temporarily delete the style(s) from your stylesheet, then run a report to show Undefined styles; which would list the unknown styles and which topics they're used in.

To actually remove them, you'd need to do a find and replace; e.g. to find and remove/replace a style class:
- Open find and replace, and tick 'Find in source code'.
- Search for the class, say class="your_style", and remove it or replace with a different class.

[wvnomad]

Thanks for the quick answer. That's what I thought it was going to be. hmmm..Maybe the smart people at MadCap could use this post as an enhancment request?

[LTinker68]

You could do a find just on the class name (make sure "find in source code" is enabled) and search the whole project. Unfortunately, that won't tell you if you're using a style in the page layout. At least, I don't think it does, but maybe Flare's search treats the page layouts as topics when it does a find.

MadCap Support may come to the forums occasionally, but that's no guarantee they'll see the post or note the request as a feature request, so you should submit one yourself at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx. Make sure you ask for the ability for it to look for the styles in the page layout, masterpage, snippets, and the stylesheet themselves (with auto-numbering formats you can call a span but the span doesn't show up in the topic directly -- at least, not in the authoring environment where you'd do the find).

[forfear]

hmmm..Maybe the smart people at MadCap could use this post as an enhancment request?

Log up a bug/enhancement request on it. Someone's already posted a similar one like this, and if more people log up requests for it, there's a good chance it'll get included in a future release. The support people at MadCap pop in and out of discussions only when discussions heat up sometimes for good measure.

I believe I've logged one similar to this.

Best thing, log up an enhancement request and you can link the enhancement request to the post for good measure.