MadCap Software Forums

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 ...

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 ...

My stylesheet includes several styles for formatting text but the style rules are expressed in different ways. Some begin span. but others begin with just the dot. I want to be more uniform. Which is best practice?

Two examples:

span.myEmphasis {
font-weight: bold;
color: var ...

It's from around 2008, so make that 14 years! Still worth reporting though, as I assume they'll fix by priority and numbers of reports, rather than age.[/quote]

From MadCap tech support:

"Hello Bruce,

Thank you for contacting MadCap Software Technical Support.

As the forum post had suggested ...

This thread has some information that might help. https://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=21796 It looks like it is an old bug.

Yes, I saw that post. I assumed that an 8 year old bug would have been fixed. I guess not. I'm going to raise it as a support case and see what they say.

I've created a style p.preParaSpacePlus which has a little more top margin than my normal p style.

The para following a p.preParaSpacePlus is normally a plain old p para, without a class, so that's what I want the topic editor to revert to when I hit ENTER at the end of a p.preParaSpacePlus.

I ...

FIXED!

Someone on the Flare users group on LinkedIn gave me the answer.

It's not a style setting. It's a target setting. Do PDF target > Advanced tab and tick Collapse top margin and top of page/column.
Simple when you know how!

I'm encountering top margin problems when my topic text wraps over to second and subsequent pages.

My paras are spaced using some top margin. When a para automatically wraps over between two pages, the fragment on the second page is rendered in the PDF with the same top margin as its parent para. I ...

It should work for both.

In the table stylesheet, just leave the margin as (not set) / Length:(default) . Then it won't apply any margins, and will use whatever margin you set for table in your regular stylesheet.

Also, you can set inline margins on each table, so check the individual table ...

Applying a -1px left margin to the whole table is my stopgap solution. It does mean I can't use table styles, though. After some experimentation I've discovered that Flare's regular stylesheets allow a negative left margin on table elements, but tablestyles only allow zero or positive margins.

I ...

I'd suggest reporting it as a bug to MadCap, and see what they say.

I have reported it. In the meanwhile, I still need to counteract the offset in the project I'm working on, and applying a -1px left margin to the whole table is my stopgap solution.

It does mean I can't use table styles, though ...

I tried looking at the styles being applied using Inspect in Chrome. It didn't show any unexpected margin or padding. So I've still no idea where this is coming from.

I ended up having to apply a -1px left margin to the whole table. That feels like a bit of a bodge but I guess it will have to do ...

I had the same problem. The solution was to use 'float-left' for the mc-auto-number-position attribute:
mc-auto-number-position: float-left;

Yes, that's what I ended up doing.

In full, my solution ended up as:

h2 {
font-size: 14pt;
font-weight: bold;
text-transform: uppercase;
margin ...

1. Goto "search" and enable regex.
2. Do the first find & replace:
2.1. Search for ([^>]*)(</source>) and replace it with $1$2<seg-source><mrk mtype="seg" mid="1">$1</mrk></seg-source>
3. Do the second find & replace in the same file:
3.1. Search for (<target state="translated">)([^<]*) and ...

Thank you, Psider - that's very helpful. It'll give me a head start trying out the Dev Tools.

I've just tried creating a table style using a table stylesheet rather than a regular stylesheet. Rather than dive into the CSS, I let Flare's TableStyle Editor do the heavy lifting. I set margins to 0, borders to none, padding to none, and separators to none.

There's still a mystery misalignment ...

I am transitioning to Flare as my main technical authoring environment.

My main LSP - whom I've given Word files to in the past - uses Trados but has never dealt with Flare files before. We've agreed they'll see if they can do it using output from a dummy Flare project I've created.

I'm a relative ...

I think it's highly likely that the small offset you see is just a glitch/bug in Flare's PDF generation, and not a problem in your CSS.
Try it starting with a new empty project and blank stylesheet, and you'll see exactly the same slight offset on table cells.

If it does turn out to be a Flare ...

I usually create a temporary stylesheet and use that for the web output to try to see what's happening. Not all pdf quirks translate to the web though, unfortunately.

OK. Good idea. I guess I'd better see what this Dev Tools thing is and how to use it. I don't have a programming or web background ...

Did you use your browser's Dev Tools and select the text to see what's getting applied?

The output is a PDF. This project, like all my projects so far, only has a print PDF target, with no online output at all.

All the relevant styles are inside the print media area of my stylesheet so even if I ...

Could there be a text-indent of a couple of pixels/points floating around somewhere in your stylesheet?

None that I can see.

I have gone through the stylesheet thoroughly and deleted all the styles I'm not using. I've examined those styles that are left. I can't see anything in those styles that ...

I am using a 2-column table to arrange the document information block at the start of a product note template with a PDF target.

I want the bones of the table to be invisible, with the left edges of the text that's inside the first column cells lining up exactly with the text above and below the ...

Thanks, Dave. That was a great help.

Coming over to Flare from MS Word, I'm used to using tab stops and tab characters to align text. I know that tab stops don't really exist in the web-oriented technologies Flare uses, but I was wondering whether I can at least insert tab characters and what control I have over them.

Am I right in ...