MadCap Software Forums

However, Flare does severely restrict the styles that are available in the XML editor when you're inside a dropdown, ...
Why?
Once I did the "surgery" (nice term that :) ) Flare hasn't got problems with it - it even correctly builds it in the help ... so why prevent it?

That would be a question ...

Have you tried looking at the output in multiple browsers? This sounds like a browser-compatibility issue to me. Some browsers interpret Float differently than others.

I don't use drop-downs, but don't they only work on the single block tag (<p>, <div>, <hr>, etc.) immediately following the drop-down head? So if you had a rule followed by a paragraph, only the rule would show up because that's the first block tag after the drop-down head.

No, you can put more ...

How many styles are that? I'd put them into the main CSS and name them differently or craft a second CSS and reference that for the topic.

Wouldn't work for an email unless you could host the css somewhere.

Then I misunderstood. So the email message itself is supposed to get styling via CSS?? I ...

As far as I know this isn't controlled by the Medium, it's controlled by the target type. Since Help is an online format, it defaults to closed, and when you tell a browser to print it prints the current contents of the page (sometimes not all that accurately, but that's another story...)

The reason I asked about this is that I'm working on a project that includes, among other items, an e-mail newsletter. One of the requirements for the e-mail newsletter is embedded CSS. I'm thinking of using Flare for this project and wanted to verify that it can support this.

Will styles in the ...

Just to cover the bases - is the drive full?

How many styles are that? I'd put them into the main CSS and name them differently or craft a second CSS and reference that for the topic.

Wouldn't work for an email unless you could host the css somewhere.

To answer the OP's question, you might be able to embed the style info in the master ...

Ok, there are a few things here:

1) If you want to indent something, don't use Tab. The Tab key opens up the various grouping controls like Blockquote and Div (which are useful things, but they're overkill for indenting list items). Use the Indent icon on the toolbar instead.

2) The first reason ...

From my experience with HTML Help, you can achieve almost anything you want inside the content pane (i.e. where your topic content appears), but outside of the content pane you are pretty much stuck with what Microsoft provides. As RamonS says, the CHM viewer is what it is, and there isn't any way ...

RamonS wrote:By design, an include overrides any exclude and no tagging is interpreted as include. Sure, could have been done the other way around, but it would just create other problems.

To put it another way, in Flare the only purpose of an explicit Include condition is to over-ride an Exclude condition.

So if you're in a paragraph and want to see list-related styles, you have to click the list icon to start a list, then you see related styles. If you're in a list and want to see paragraph styles, then you either turn off (terminate) the list or you click the list actions icon and select "Make ...

Hmmm... it has been a while since I tried this, maybe they fixed it. I'll have to give it a whirl.

One tip for this type of thing: apply the formatting to the topic first, then create the dropdown. I find this works easier than trying to format the contents of the dropdown after it's in place.

I may be imagining things, but I seem to recall a thread here where someone said they were able to solve a similar issue by re-registering the itcc.dll.

Just musing aloud here... what if you put a "CSS Version" selector in each target? Then, when you do a build, code could be added to the CSS in the medium that the target uses to support that CSS level. This would allow you to enable CSS3 for PDF but not for WebHelp simply by enabling CSS3 in the ...

I don't think the automated Mini-TOC currently supports the use of tables (as you say, you could do it manually, but that negates the benefit of automatically generating it). This sounds like a good feature request.

http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx

Standard MVP spiel:

If you run into a problem, submit a bug report, even if you know that someone else has done so already. There are two reasons for this:

1 - Madcap has told us that the more people submit reports about something, the higher priority it is given.
2 - It's possible that you have ...

Well, it is a lot simpler with hyperlinks because the link text is embedded in the topic, meaning the Variable code can work exactly as it does in the rest of the topic tags. By comparison, in an XREF the link text is generated during the build process - so the programming involved in implementing ...

As another positive sign, Flare is developed in .NET, which is Microsoft's currently favoured development platform (so if they're going to put any effort into making legacy applications work, it's going to be in the .NET area at a minimum). Plus, the applications that are most likely to have ...

You could do something with a user selecting in the XREF setup, but that might get cumbersome. I'd have to see how it worked to make a judgement.
Right, I can envision a control (well, two controls) wherein you select either an xref format, or a static user-defined text string. I agree that it ...

One caveat: if you're going to use non-Microsoft hosting technologies, make sure you choose WebHelp and not WebHelp Plus as your output type. WebHelp Plus to the best of my knowledge requires IIS to work, whereas plain ol' WebHelp is standard HTML / CSS / JS and can run anywhere.

Also, if you are using Mediums, I would avoid the Non-Print one. Generally speaking, for online formats like HTML Help and WebHelp, you are best off to use the Default medium, and for printed formats like Word, Frame, or PDF, use the Print medium. The one caveat here is that if a user prints a topic ...

Hi Mattf, Lauraj

Thanks for your comments. Just to make clear, I am not proposing that hyperlinks and cross references should be merged as they are currently. I am suggesting that cross references should be updated to support modifiable link text, external urls, and variables i.e. the features ...

Ah, I see: I thought you were trying to apply the span to text inside the snippet rather than to the snippet tag within the topic.

From looking at your example, I don't think this is a place that I would use a snippet at all; instead, I would use a Variable for this type of thing. Variables are ...