MadCap Flare: The Medium is Part of the Message

by Neil Perlin

Stylesheet mediums, located in the Stylesheet Editor, can automatically reformat your content depending on the output target you’re generating.

Let’s say that you have to generate two output targets from your project: online and print. You want the h1 headings to be blue in the online output; black in print output.

You could create two stylesheets, one for the online output with h1 set to blue; one for print with h1 set to black. That would work but it’s inefficient because you’re creating and maintaining two style sheets, and you will have to remember to pick the right style sheet when you generate each output.

Mediums are simpler...

Think of a medium as a category of output for which you want to set different properties for some styles instead of their default settings. Let’s say that most of your outputs are online so you decide to make blue the default font color for h1. However, because you want the h1's to be black when you print, “Print” is the medium.