TechNote (Archived)

Stylesheets Generated When Saving a FrameMaker 5.5.x Document as HTML

When you save a document as HTML, Adobe FrameMaker 5.5.x generates a cascading stylesheet (*.css), which conveys the document's formatting information to Web browsers. FrameMaker always generates a stylesheet; you cannot disable this feature.

Before saving a FrameMaker document as HTML, consider the following:

- Stylesheets do not include formatting information from layout overrides:

Stylesheets contain formatting information from the paragraph and character formats in your FrameMaker document; they do not contain formatting information from layout overrides. To preserve all formatting in a document saved as HTML, you should first remove overrides from the FrameMaker document and then restore any lost formatting, without using overrides. To do this task quickly, you can use the Create and Apply Formats command: Choose File > Utilities > Create and Apply Formats. FrameMaker creates and applies new paragraph and character formats for the overrides. For more information, see page 430 of the Adobe FrameMaker 5.5 User Guide.

- Names of classes in stylesheets must be supported by the Web browser:

To name classes in the stylesheet, FrameMaker 5.5.x uses the names of the paragraph and character formats in the document. However, Web browsers don't recognize class names that begin with a hyphen or number or include spaces, underscores, or special characters. Before saving a document as HTML, make sure that the paragraph and character formats have names that the stylesheet can recognize. Otherwise, the formatting for those classes will not appear.

- Only browsers that support stylesheets can display the HTML document correctly:

For HTML files to appear with formatting (beyond the limitations noted above), their stylesheets must be in the same folder as the HTML file, and the browser must support stylesheets. Browsers that support stylesheets include Netscape Navigator 4.x and later and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.x and later.