Using one stylesheet for many deliverables

[ccardimon]

Trying not to maintain multiple CSS stylesheets anymore. I have too many! My aim is to take my main stylesheet, the one I keep copying over and over again, and use it across deliverables. Any and all hints, tips, and suggestions are welcome.

[Nita Beck]

You don't say if all of those deliverables are produced from a single project or from individual projects.

Assuming the latter, I suggest that you create a global project and put your master stylesheet there. Then in your individual ("local") projects, you can create an import file that imports that global stylesheet and associate the target(s) with it.

If you need to have any target-specific variations to styles, you can create a "local" stylesheet to associate with a target; link that local stylesheet to the global stylesheet.

For instance, I do this for the various Help systems that I produce for one of my clients. The client has very specific branding guidelines that dictate things such as the font and colors I am allowed to use in the Help systems. My global stylesheet controls all the "base" styles I need. But the individual software teams also "brand" their applications' UIs with specific color usage, so I try to "brand" the corresponding Help systems as well. Say a team uses orange in a lot of their toolbar buttons and in their application splash screen? I'll try to use that same orange in the Help system, so the local stylesheet will add orange to various styles, such as for headings or perhaps as a background color for heading rows for tables. Yet another team might use a lot of blue, so the local stylesheet for their Help system will use blue for headings and table heading rows.

Make sense?

[ccardimon]

Individual projects. I'll have to sit and think about what you're saying.

[helen]

Yes, I do it the same way Nita has described. I have a couple of CSS files in my master project (depending on the client), the same project also contains page layouts, master pages, conditional tags and a glossary amongst other fun things. For each slave project I create a Flare import file that goes off to my master project and yoinks the required files in. I exclude some if I don't need them on a case by case basis. It took a long time to get it as perfect as I could for both printed and online output but I'm rather pleased with the results. It's much less overhead once you've got a system up and running - only an occasional tweak required.