WebHelp Fonts

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Suzette Seveny
Posts: 90
Joined: Tue Apr 12, 2005 2:44 pm
Location: Ontario Canada

WebHelp Fonts

Unread post by Suzette Seveny »

Posting on behalf of our UX Designer:

We produce technical content that is primarily published as WebHelp. Yet with the editor, we can only define and apply a single font. Since we are concerned with web-safe fonts, our available fonts are very limited.

Is there some way to create styles specifically for WebHelp output where we could define the multi-font font stack that we want?

The set of web-safe fonts is inadequate and disappointing and the fact that we can only choose 1 means the options are very, very limited.
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Tim Green
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Re: WebHelp Fonts

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Suzette,

A family of fallback fonts is actually automatically generated for all websafe fonts. As you have noticed, there is not yet the option to define your own font families within Help+Manual. This is partly for clarity, since the basic design philosophy is to try to not include anything that would not be available for all output formats, and you can't use font families for PDF and DOCX and eBooks, for example.

However, there are a couple of things you can do. If you are using Premium Pack skins you can activate Google Web Fonts, use them in both your WebHelp output and the Help+Manual editor and define and map them as you wish in the definition file provided for that purpose.

Alternatively, you can redefine your font references yourself with your own font families in an additional CSS file added to the baggage section of your WebHelp skin. To do this first have a look at your WebHelp output folder and locate the CSS file containing the formatting for your project content. This will normally be called default.css, or hmprojectstyles.css in some skins. It may have another name if you have renamed it in your HTML Export Options.

Then study how the styles are set up, which is quite simple: Font attributes are defined with span.f_StyleName, paragraph attributes are defined with .p_StyleName, where "StyleName" is the name of the style in your Help+Manual project. Then create your own CSS file with your font definitions and add it to the Baggage Files section of your WebHelp skin. Then open the HTML Page Templates > Default template in the skin and add a <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="yourstylesheet.css" /> reference for your stylesheet AFTER the <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<%STYLESHEET%>" /> reference for the default stylesheet.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Suzette Seveny
Posts: 90
Joined: Tue Apr 12, 2005 2:44 pm
Location: Ontario Canada

Re: WebHelp Fonts

Unread post by Suzette Seveny »

Thanks Tim, I've forwarded this information to him, and he says it makes sense.
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