Font not appearing correctly in webhelp output

[Paul Suderman]

Hi there,

My webhelp topic text (on the right) is for some reason showing up as serif text, even though in the editor, it is definitely sans-serif. The TOC and everything is showing up with the proper sans font, just the actual topic text.



I tried to find the issue in the skin file, but I could only find references to MS Trebuchet, which is a sans font.

Any thoughts would be appreciated,

Thanks,

Paul

[Tim Green]

Hi Paul,

My guess is that those are "Normal" paragraphs. There was a reset in the original release of the new Premium Pack responsive skins that affected Normal if it was used directly but not if you used the better method and never used Normal directly. This has been fixed in the 3.01 update. To get it, you just need to re-download and use the updated version of the skin.

This happened because of a combination of two factors: The topic pages are now frameless, so CSS affects the entire page, and Help & Manual defines the CSS for "Normal" for the global <p> paragraph attribute, affecting all paragraphs on the page that are not defined differently. As part of standard good HTML design practice, the new skins reset all global HTML elements to make sure that different browser defaults don't negatively affect the layout. However, doing this for the <p> tag also affects Normal if it is used directly. The effect of the skin setup in development wasn't noticed because all of the test projects used a Body Text style based on Normal instead of using Normal directly.

Generally speaking, it is better not to use Normal directly, and also not to apply any paragraph attributes to it (indents, space before after, line height etc). Ideally, you should use Normal to define the base font for your project and then base all the styles you actually use on it, and those styles should then have the paragraph attributes you need.

[Paul Suderman]

Hi Tim,

I tried your suggestion of downloading the updated PP, and it did not seem to fix the problem.

I'm using Minimalist Standard from the 3.01 Premium Pack.

Is there an easy find-and-replace type solution that could replace all my Normal paragraphs with a style that I could clone for the purpose?

Thanks,

Paul

[Tim Green]

Hi Paul,

This is odd and I can't reproduce it -- all the test projects I change the base font of Normal on propagate normally to the output. Please mail me a small demo project at support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @) and I will test it out for you.

Is there an easy find-and-replace type solution that could replace all my Normal paragraphs with a style that I could clone for the purpose?

You can do this with the advanced search and replace feature in PP Toolbox, which includes an advanced feature for replacing the attributes in XML tags in all the topics in your project if you want. Please make a backup of your project before trying this, because global source code operations like this are always potentially risky:

1) Open your project in PP Toolbox and select Advanced Search and Replace in the Tools menu, then select the XML tab.
2) See the attached screenshot: Enter the name of the tag at the top, in lower case letters (1). You will want to do this at least for the "para" and "text" tags, because they are separate and they must match.
3) Enter "styleclass" as the attribute to change and "Normal" (note the upper case!) as the value to change in (2).
4) Enter "Body Text" or the name of your own body text style as the new value for the attribute in (3).
5) Perform a Preview with a limited number of replacements to check everything is OK, then perform the replacement.

Once you have done this for the "para" tag, repeat it for the "text" tag. You must do this, otherwise the style assignments for the paragraph and text attributes won't match. If you have lists formatted with Normal you will also want to do this for the "li" tag.

Clip1.png