I'm a big fan of working as efficiently as possible. With that in mind, I teach students who attend my live, online RoboHelp classes how to create Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) on the first day of class. And then I teach how to create master pages on the second day. Of all the wonderful features you'll find in RoboHelp, CSS and Master Pages are arguably two of the most important things to learn and use if you want to work more efficiently in RoboHelp.
If you create a CSS you'll be able to quickly control the look and feel of all of the topics in your project. You can control such things as font formatting, background colors, background images and link colors.
By creating and applying master pages to topics, you can quickly add static objects to topics such as headers and footers (something you cannot do using CSS).
The process of applying either a CSS or a Master Page to a topic is nearly the same. Select a group of topics via the Topic List pod, show the Topic Properties and then visit either the General tab (where you can apply the Master Page) or the Appearance tab (where you can apply the CSS).
Of course, applying both the Master Page and the CSS to project topics does require visiting those two different tabs (General and Appearance), which just isn't very efficient. Looking to double-down? You can automatically have the Master Page apply your CSS to a topic at the same time that you apply the Master Page, thereby eliminating the need to visit multiple tabs.
- Show the Properties of a Master Page.
- On the Appearance tab, select your CSS from the list of available Style Sheets (you can also create a CSS on the fly by clicking the New button and copy a CSS in from any other project via the browser button).
- Click the OK button.
Any topics that were previously using your Master Page will now be using the CSS you selected. In the future, when you apply the Master Page to any topics, those topics will also get the CSS. Should you edit the Properties of the Master Page and change the assigned CSS, all topics using the Master Page will instantly be updated.
