Styles and Stylesheets

Styles are used to control the look and feel of your documentation, and keep the content separate from its presentation. The styling is based on cascading stylesheets (CSS), which is an international standard for formatting web content, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (or W3C).

Flare lets you work with stylesheets in a number of ways. You can use a primary stylesheet, automatically associating it with all files at the target level or project level (recommended). However, if you have some topics that you want to use a different stylesheet, you also have the option of associating those individual files with that other stylesheet. Once you’ve set up your stylesheet, you can apply its styles to the different pieces of content in your topics and snippets.

As much as possible, you should avoid the opposite of styles, which is local formatting. For example, you can highlight some text and make it green and italic right where that content exists. But if you make that same change in many places, it takes a lot longer and it's a lot more work to control the look of that content if you later change your mind.

Note If you are interested in your project's look and feel from a branding perspective, consider the Branding.css file. This stylesheet groups together common branding elements (e.g., logo, hero image, font, color palette) to match the output with your company's brand. See Branding.