Re: Tools -- RoboHelp/Webhelp style alignment issues in Firefox

[Lech Rzedzicki <xchaotic -at- gmail -dot- com>]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 6:31 PM, Char James-Tanny <charjtf -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:


> The problem is in the CSS somewhere, and usually Firefox is the one
> that is doing what's been coded...IE is a much more forgiving browser
> and tends to display what you want, rather than what's coded.
>

I can only second that - Firefox is more standards compliant (i.e. recent
builds pass ACID2 tests and most of ACID3).
You can double check in another standards compliant browser such as Opera,
Safari or Chrome to verify that.


> Can you post the CSS definitions for lists from the different .css files?
>
CSS is really quite simple, the page you're used to seeing in a web browser,
for CSS is a box, with a number of areas with margins, paddings, borders etc
and each of those can be style.
In particular, if you want an indent for some list items but not all of
them. There's quite a few ways to achieve what you want, but one way is to
define a generic class in css like this:
.indent_level1 { text-indent: 0.25in }
.indent_level2 { text-indent: 0.25in }

The in the output HTML, the nested <li> items should have those in a class
attribute, like this:
<ul>
<li>No nesting</li>
<li><ul><li class="indent_level1">0.25 indent here</li></ul></li>
</ul>

There's quite a few rules that come into play such as inheritance, relative
vs absolute positioning etc.
You also mentioned 0.25 as your desired margin, which might look good on
your screen, but it is an abolute distance, which might be too big on a
small netbook screen or too small on a big designer LCD. Whyle having a good
CSS with relative values is harder to achieve, it scales nicely across
different screens.
If you don't feel too strong about CSS, it's probably best to outsource
those simple improvements, most web diesigners are well aware of IE quirks
and positioning issues.

There's yet another thing, albeit unlikely, Robohelp generates quite a bit
of Javascript and JS can override CSS positioning. To ensure that it is not
the source of the problem, try displaying the page with Javascript off (many
help features such as search won't work, but you should be able to see the
indentation).

Regards, Lech
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

ComponentOne Doc-To-Help 2009 is your all-in-one authoring and publishing 
solution. Author in Doc-To-Help's XML-based editor,  Microsoft Word or 
HTML and publish to the Web, Help systems or printed manuals. 
http://www.doctohelp.com

Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/

---
You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as archive -at- web -dot- techwr-l -dot- com -dot- 

To unsubscribe send a blank email to 
techwr-l-unsubscribe -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
or visit http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/options/techwr-l/archive%40web.techwr-l.com


To subscribe, send a blank email to techwr-l-join -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com

Send administrative questions to admin -at- techwr-l -dot- com -dot-  Visit
http://www.techwr-l.com/ for more resources and info. 

Please move off-topic discussions to the Chat list, at:
http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/listinfo/techwr-l-chat