Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a mechanism for adding style to web documents, such as fonts, colors, or spacing. CSS are somewhat comparable to styles in Microsoft Word: You define a style with certain attributes, which apply to all paragraphs that have the corresponding style attribute. CSS is the preferred way of formatting HTML document, as they can be used to give HTML documents a consistent and professional look.
The CSS specification was defined by the 
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). If you are new to CSS, you will find tutorials, examples, and reference information on the W3C webpage. For information on CSS, see the links at the bottom of this topic.
Using CSS with Help Files
Most HTML Help files have at least one shared CSS that is used to format the HTML documents. To use CSS in you help files, you can create embedded or external CSS, you can have Help Producer generate a CSS automatically from the styles in your Word document, or you can use both. Experienced web developers prefer to create the CSS manually, as they have greater control over the styles in the CSS.
Create a style sheet from your Word document styles
- On the Help Producer toolbar, click Configure Help Project
. - From the tree view, select the category Filter, and select the tab CSS.
- In the field Generated CSS file, specify the path or filename to the generated CSS style sheet. The file should reside in the output folder or a sub-folder of the output folder.
By default, Help Producer will create a style sheet with the name default.css.
Note The generated CSS file will be overwritten every time the help project is exported.
Use an external CSS style sheet
- On the Help Producer toolbar, click Configure Help Project .
- From the tree view, select the category Filter, and select the tab CSS.
- In the field External CSS file, specify the path or filename to the external CSS style sheet. The file should reside in the output folder or a sub-folder of the output folder.
Reference Information
Cascading Style Sheets Home Page