Highlight spans in Flare, but not in output

EllaP · Post by **EllaP** » Thu Mar 25, 2021 7:02 am

Hi all,

I have a fairly low-stakes question: Is there any way to highlight text styles with a color, but the color is only visible in Flare and not in the HTML5 output?

For instance, if I use style 1, Flare highlights the content in green. However, the output doesn't show the color.

We use a variety of text styles, and you can't tell them apart in the Flare topic. I know it's easy to find out which style was used. But it would be nice for reviewers if they could tell just by looking at the page which style was used.

Post by **Nita Beck** » Thu Mar 25, 2021 12:50 pm

Welcome to the forums!

I suppose that you can have each style be associated with a condition, and it's the condition that will supply the color in the XML Editor. But then you can have the target just ignore those conditons. You don't want the target to exclude those conditions, else the characters within the span will be removed.

More on associating conditions with stylese here: https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare20 ... Styles.htm

doloremipsum · Post by **doloremipsum** » Thu Mar 25, 2021 6:26 pm

Maybe you could add a medium (called Internal or similar) to your stylesheet, and set colours on the styles using that medium only. When you're editing in Flare, you can view that medium to see the colours, but the medium wouldn't be associated with any outputs so it won't be seen when you publish.

Post by **NorthEast** » Fri Mar 26, 2021 1:44 am

If it's for HTML5 only (and not PDFs), then you could "undo" the colour by referencing something that only exists in the output topic.

For example, in the output, the HTML tag has an attribute <html ... data-mc-target-type="WebHelp2" ...> which isn't in the source (Flare editor).
So you could use that in your CSS to reset the colour back to transparent in your output.

Code: Select all

span.whatever 
{
    background-color: green;
}

html[data-mc-target-type*="WebHelp2"] span.whatever 
{
    background-color: transparent;
}

EllaP · Post by **EllaP** » Fri Mar 26, 2021 2:35 am

Thanks, everybody

This was super helpful. I'll try out all options and see which works best for us.

Post by **Nita Beck** » Fri Mar 26, 2021 4:50 am

Doh!

Our friend doloremipsum reminds me of a strategy I've used after importing legacy content into Flare. I create a second stylesheet that first @import(s) everything from the main stylesheet and then I add background colors to all sorts of classes. I might call this the "cleanup" or "debug" stylesheet. I temporarily associate the primary target with that stylesheet so that I could then see those classes in operation while cleaning up topics post import. Once that cleanup sweep is done, I associate the target with the main stylesheet.

I think I invented this workflow at a point in the past before Flare added the ability to associate a condition with a style.

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Highlight spans in Flare, but not in output

Highlight spans in Flare, but not in output

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Re: Highlight spans in Flare, but not in output