MadCap Software Forums

Thanks! That helped a lot. A lot depends on how your users will open your help site. If it's opened from an app, then you need to write code in your app that controls how the help site is opened and displayed. For example, if the help is for a Windows app, then your app can display your help site in...

How do I make it so that the HTML5 side nav help site opens in a minimal-functionality browser window i.e. a window without the usual URL entry bar, forward and back buttons, favourites, and all the toolbar stuff that normally comes at the top of a browser window? My aims are to to make it so that t...

I modified the existing (primary) stylesheet and the changes are there when I build the target in Flare, but when I tried to publish locally, the stylesheet reverts back to before I made the changes. What could be causing it to behave this way? Is your project set up to import the stylesheet from a...

A short while after creating this thread, I stumbled upon the MadCap-specific parameter data-mc-conditions , which looks like it might help me do what I want. I could tag the specific instances of the topic which I want to style differently by applying a condition tag on their TOC entries. The styl...

Target mediums (the mediums you select in the target settings) are a pretty basic way to include additional CSS to a specific target/output. The way Flare's target mediums work is quite basic. During the build process, Flare essentially copies and pastes what's in the medium to the end of your outp...

In my own practice, I reserve the print medium for styling content that is printed from a browser. I create a PDF medium exclusively for the PDF output. It does not inherit from the print medium. Thanks, Nita. I didn't even realise that you could create your own mediums until a few posts ago. MadCa...

That's actually quite tricky. If you're using the exact same topic in multiple places, then it's going to be exactly the same in each place. I can't think of a way to make each instance of the topic appear 'different', whether that's using conditions or anything else. A short while after creating t...

Yes, you've got the gist of it. Great. Thanks for confirming. I suggest that you look at using MEDIUMs, as that might allow you to get where you want to go. I'm working inside the @media print medium. I only want to change 2 or 3 styles. Any new medium would need to inherit everything else from the...

P.S. if I really want to do the latter (alter style parameters such as text size or colour if a specific condition has been applied at the file level) then am I right in thinking it's the use of data-mc-conditions inside square brackets [ ] that I need to be exploring instead?

An article I was reading this morning mentioned mc-conditions. The feature sounded useful, just going by its name alone, so I Googled a bit and read the Flare help. I think I understand what mc-conditions is for, but I'm not completely sure. Just as a sanity check, can somebody confirm if I've got t...

Hmm, on re-read my suggestion is best for the entire table, but probably can't be narrowed down to specific columns - they're not really proper items with descendants in the HTML. I'm experimenting putting a rule like the one below into my regular stylesheet. Assuming that hyphenation has been turn...

You'll need only to set up one heading style, for the h1, using the {chapnum} autonumber. Here's what mine looks like: h1.Appendix { mc-auto-number-format: 'Appendix {chapnum}. '; } Then, for the TOC item for the first appendix, on the (TOC) Properties window's Auto-numbers tab under Chapter Number...

P.S. my question here came out the same frustration that prompted my other post here: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=33987. They should maybe be merged. They started as separate threads only because I was looking at the same basic problem in two different ways.

Yep, say you have a h1.chapter style that's used in topics on the first page of a new chapter/appendix, to add numbering to the heading. h1.chapter { mc-auto-number-format: '{chapnum}. '; } As the autonumber format is {chapnum}, it'll display the chapter value that you've set in the TOC. So, where ...

If your tables with narrow columns have a specific style class, you can specify that you want any paragraphs (of any type) within that table to use hyphens. You do this using the descendant advanced selector. The CSS would look like this: table.narrow p { mc-hyphenate: auto } This essentially says:...

Thank you, ChoccieMuffin. Lots of useful tips in there. If you want to go down that route, I'd instead create a GENERIC style (.Hyphens-On) and apply that to assorted paragraphs where you want the text to hyphenate. If that paragraph already HAS a style applied, e.g. p.WARNING, in the Text Editor yo...

Can I change the heading autonumbering scheme at volume or section breaks? Can I number the h1 headings of my top level topics 1, 2, 3, etc. in one volume or section but A, B, C,etc. in another volume or section? What I'm trying to do is have a 1, 2, 3 numbering in the main part of the PDF but switc...

I've enabled the Use TOC depth for heading levels feature in my PDF target so that I can use my TOC to organise my topics hierarchically. It's the first time I've tried this. It works OK to begin with: the first heading in a topic placed underneath a top level topic has its title heading demoted fro...

I don't like having words automatically break and hyphenate at the end of lines. I have therefore turned hyphenation off (mc-hyphenate: never) in my p style. The problem is that I have a few instances of tables with narrow columns where I do want to accept last-word-of-line hyphenation. If I don't, ...

I am trying to import a multilingual termbase into Lingo. The termbase was originally created using RWS (ex-SDL) MultiTerm. I have managed to convert it into TBX-Basic, but Lingo won't import it. From the import message log I could see that some concept entries imported OK but others didn't, and I n...

We used to use divs for notes, tips, and cautions. However one thing I discovered several years ago about divs in Flare was that in PDF outputs, the rules about where page breaks belong (mainly widows and orphans rules) went out the window inside divs. We ended up with a bunch of pages containing n...

The selector that is just the "dot" selector is a generic selector, meaning you can apply it to lists, tables, divs, paragraphs, spans -- anything. But that might not yield the result you expect univerally. If you are trying to define a selector that you'll only ever apply to inline chara...

For best practice, I'd also suggest using the em (emphasis) tag instead of span, since the style is intended to convey some emphasis; e.g. use em.myEmphasis instead of span.myEmphasis. Thanks. I didn't realise I could do that. I didn't realise em was a tag in its own right, just like p, h1, etc. Co...

Thanks. That makes sense. Divs can be positioned. Spans have to remain inline.

What is a div for and how does it differ from a span? They both seem to be for creating a chunk of content that you can then style. I've sussed that when I highlight some text in the topic and apply a style to it, Flare puts span tags in. So when would I use a div? My background is in paper-based do...