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About Skins

A skin is a file that contains information about the appearance of an online output window. A skin helps to determine:

How big the output window should be and where it should be positioned on the user's screen
Settings that are specific to certain kinds of output types (i.e., browser-based Help and HTML Help)
Which online Help tabs or accordions (e.g., TOC, index, search) are included in the output and which one should be the default element (the one that is active when users first access the output)
And other settings…

Basic Steps

Following are the basic steps for using skins in Flare:

Add skin Flare provides you with an initial skin in your project. However, you might decide to add more skins to the project so that you have different skins for different targets. See Adding Skins to a Project.
Open skin After you add a skin to your project, it is stored in the Project Organizer under the Skins folder. At any time, you can open a skin to work on it. See Opening Skins.
Edit skin After you open a skin, you can edit its settings in order to change the appearance of the output window. See Editing Skin Settings.
Associate skin with target Now that you have modified the skin, you need to associate it with the target you are building. See Associating Skins with Targets.

Note: For more details about the various ways you can modify a skin, see Skin Editor.

Note: You can download a variety of free skins with different looks from the MadCap Software website. Simply go to:

http://madcapsoftware.com/downloads/utilities/flareskingallery.aspx

After downloading the skin, you can import it into your project. See Importing Skins.

Note: If you want to display the output user interface in a particular language, you can modify styles in a language skin instead of a regular skin. When you generate output, Flare first looks at the Skin Editor. If it does not find manually entered settings in that editor, it uses those from the Language Skin Editor. If it does not find settings in either editor, it uses the default skin settings. For more information, see About Language Support.