Change the default font

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Matthew Peers
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Joined: Mon Jul 06, 2015 7:22 am

Change the default font

Unread post by Matthew Peers »

How do you change the default font for new topics and their headers?

Is there a way of changing the existing fonts for a whole project?
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Tim Green
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Re: Change the default font

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Matthew,

Welcome to the forum! The answer to both these questions is the same: You just need to change the font of the main style in your project and all the other styles based on it will change automatically. You can open the dialog to edit your styles with Styles > Edit Styles in the Write tab of Help & Manual. The main parent style is called "Normal" and almost all of the other styles are based on that.

The font of any styles based on a parent style that are not explicitly changed in their own style definition will change automatically when you change the font of the parent style. This is called inheritance: Any property defined explicitly in a child style it keeps. Anything else is inherited from its parent(s). Styles that don't have parents need to be changed individually, just like the styles that have their own explicit definitions for certain attributes.

By default, the topic header is formatted with the Heading1 style, so you can change its appearance by editing that style. The only exception to this is PDF and Word DOCX export: There only the plain text of the heading goes to the output because the styles of headings in Word and PDF output is defined in the Word and PDF templates, not in your project.

Study this chapter in the help to learn how to use formatting and styles in Help & Manual:

http://www.helpandmanual.com/help/index ... atting.htm
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Matthew Peers
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Jul 06, 2015 7:22 am

Re: Change the default font

Unread post by Matthew Peers »

Great. Also is it possible to import a custom font from a ttf file?
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Tim Green
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Re: Change the default font

Unread post by Tim Green »

Matthew Peers wrote:Great. Also is it possible to import a custom font from a ttf file?
There is no need to import fonts. If they are already installed on your Windows system you can use them in Help & Manual. You just need to select them in your style definitions, or when applying manual formatting.

The questions is different if you are wanting to use specific fonts in output formats. There, importing fonts doesn't help because the font needs to be installed on the computer of the user viewing the help. What you can do to enable them to view specific fonts depends on the output format you are using. For example, in PDF you can embed fonts that the user may not have in the PDF file. In WebHelp you can use web fonts manually, but you can't use TTF fonts for that. It all depends on what you are trying to achieve and what format you are using.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
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