Let’s face it, the default appearance of the See Alsos (technical term is Related Topics Proxy) is not that attractive. I’m not talking about the link at the bottom of a topic, I’m talking about the pop-up text bubble that opens when you click on the link.

Ew.

So, every time I build online help, I change the colors with help from the client’s color palette. Unfortunately, finding the CSS elements that affect the appearance of that box is not so straightforward. Let me help you with that.

First things first – let’s change the background color from the current gray/brown to something nicer. To do this, go to your stylesheet and do the following:

1. Open the div style.
2. Create a new class called “MCKLinkBody.”
3. Modify the background color of that class to whatever you want. In this instance, we’ll pick brick red (hex#b22222).
4. Compile the help and view the output (you cannot view changes to proxies in the Preview window).

Ours now looks like this:

This isn’t all that attractive – I just wanted to use a color that would appear to be obviously changed.

Next, I will change the hover color background. To do this:

1. Open your stylesheet.
2. Go to the td style and create a new class called “MCKLinkBodyCell_Highlighted.”
3. Set the color to whatever you want. We’ll use orange so we can see the change clearly. Check it out:

So, now you know how to change the colors. I would advise against using the bright colors above – but I think you get the point.

When I was using Flare v3, I was creating PDF output for the first time. I got this odd error in the bookmark section of the PDF:

I could not figure out what was causing it. Now I know….empty H2 tags.  I had a lonely H2 tag in my code that created that error. Once I deleted the tag, the error disappeared and the bookmark list looked wonderful.

I am able to reproduce the _gen_ error in Flare v6 as well.

So, if you’re getting a _gen_ error in your PDF output, go look for empty heading tags. They’re there!