You can’t remove or change the frameborder around the topic frame in WebHelp with the skin editor. At least I haven’t figured out how. Moving to the HTML5 target type eliminates the issue. But in case you aren’t ready for that yet, here is how you can change it post-build with a Visual Basic command line application.
- Create a Visual Basic command line application project in Visual Studio.
- Add the module below.
- Build the application. You may need to add some references to your project.
- Copy the executable to a known location.
- Use the application from the command line or a batch file. The argument is the name of the file to update.
The originating frameborder setting is on line 35 of Default.htm in this folder or a similar location in your installation:
C:\Program Files (x86)\MadCap Software\MadCap Flare V8\Flare.app\Resources\WebHelp
You could change it there. But that would change the setting for any WebHelp generated on your Flare instance. Or you can change the setting post-build in the corresponding file in WebHelp output. The program reads the the text of the file into a string, changes the frameborder setting text in the string, and replaces the text of of the file with the string. Double double quotes are escape sequences for double quotes in Visual Basic.
Module RemoveFrameBorderFromTopicPane
'argument is the file to fix
'changes the frameborder for the topic pane from 1 to 0
Sub Main(ByVal cmdArgs() As String)
Dim fileReader As String
fileReader = My.Computer.FileSystem.ReadAllText(cmdArgs(0))
fileReader = fileReader.Replace("frame name=""body"" title=""Topic"" frameborder=""1""", "frame name=""body"" style=""border-left-color:#8cbe4f; border-left-width:2px; border-left-style:solid;"" title=""Topic"" frameborder=""0""")
My.Computer.FileSystem.WriteAllText(cmdArgs(0), fileReader, False)
End Sub
End Module
Re: “You can’t remove or change the frameborder around the topic frame in WebHelp with the skin editor.”
Did you by chance ask Madcap for any guidance on this? Just curious: I’m willing to accept it can’t be changed but wonder if Madcap had any ideas…
I didn’t. It would be good to check. But I did examine the Skin Editor pretty closely. In any case there are two takeaways: 1. You can change skin behavior outside of the editor. 2. If you make changes to the installation source, those changes affect all of your builds. But you can make the changes to the output instead.