Glossary terms styling - tried everything!

[Harxy]

I've been on these forums all day, trying to figure out how to change the style of the glossary term links in the topic. They link to other topics, not to a glossary definition.

I've tried changing:

Madcap || glossaryTerm
a.glossaryTerm
div.glossaryTerm

I've even taken the complex selectors from another topic and manually put them in the stylesheet.

Nothing is making the glossary terms (added with Ctrl+shift+T) come out in the webhelp as anything but hyperlinks in terms of format.

I'm pulling out my hair! Does anyone have any idea what I'm missing?

Thanks,

[LTinker68]

Nothing is making the glossary terms (added with Ctrl+shift+T) come out in the webhelp as anything but hyperlinks in terms of format.

Are you trying to make them not be hyperlinks, or you want to change the colors, underline, etc. of the hyperlink?

[Harxy]

Yes, I want to change the colour and underline of the link, and I want it to still link as a glossary item, but I don't want all my hyperlinks to change - basically, only the glossary links need to be green with a dashed underline, all the normal hyperlinks can remain blue...

Thanks!

[LTinker68]

And when you said you modified a.glossaryTerm, did you mean you styled the pseudo-classes beneath it? And did you do them in the correct order, which is link, visited, focus, hover, active (although you won't see all those pseudo-classes listed in the stylesheet). If you didn't modify them in that order -- if you did it alphabetically, for example -- then you'll need to open the stylesheet in the Internal Text Editor and rearrange the styles so that they're listed in the above order (from top to bottom), or delete them then redo the styles in the correct order via the Stylesheet Editor.

Hyperlink styles have to be modified in that order in order for the mouseover effects to work.

[Harxy]

Hi,

Yeah I read that in one of the forums - but I don't need any hover styles... will it stop everything from working if they are not in that order? I'll check that tomorrow and make sure they are correct...


thanks again

[LTinker68]

Yeah I read that in one of the forums - but I don't need any hover styles... will it stop everything from working if they are not in that order? I'll check that tomorrow and make sure they are correct...

That style order is an HTML convention and nothing to do with Flare, beyond the fact that they don't nudge you into the correct behavior by listing the pseudo-classes in the correct order. You can't not have a hover style because that's part of the mouseover effect. You can style the hover pseudo-class to look the same as the other pseudo-classes so that your users won't see anything change when they hover over the link, but if you don't style the hover pseudo-class then it will inherit the style of the base <a> tag, and if nothing is defined for the base <a> tag then it will use the browser's default hover style.

[MarinaMichaels]

You said "Nothing is making the glossary terms (added with Ctrl+shift+T) come out in the webhelp as anything but hyperlinks in terms of format." Are you talking about the terms that then show up in the glossary section of the help, and that have their own file under Project > Glossaries?

[Harxy]

Just to be clear, here is what I have done:

- Created a group of topics. These are all the words that I want to be in my glossary
- Filled these topics in with info
- added these words to the Glossaries file in the project organiser tab. Instead of entering definitions I added links to the topics I made above.
- In the main body of the project, I found a word I wanted that was in the glossary I made. Let's say the word is "controller"
- I highlighted Controller and I pressed Ctrl-Alt-T. This found the word controller in my glossary and therefore linked the word
- I opened the project - perfect! It linked to my Controller topic. But the link looks like any other hyperlink, and worse, has that horrible "open image" arrow thing which I personally don't like. I want the text green, with a dotted underline and no image for my glossary links.
- I go back, change a.glossary term to what I want in the master stylesheet, then rebuild. No change.
- I change div.glossaryTerm and all the other glossaryTerm things I can find that I listed above. Nothing makes any difference to my glossary link.
- I cry and head to the forums.

I am not at work, so I have not had a chance to test LTinker's suggestions above, but I will do first thing.

Thanks for any other help/suggestions you can offer...

[Harxy]

Cheers Dave, everybody,

Thank you for all your advice, thanks to a combination of a lot of advice on here I've got my glossary terms sorted.

Thank you again for all the help.

Paul

[Harxy]

I'm having an absolute nightmare today... more help needed, if anyone can offer it...

So all the above issues are sorted, but now the popup box that appears when the glossary term is clicked has far too much height! I want it to be auto. I have changed it to auto everywhere like a mad man. Nothing helps. Here are some of the places I have turned height to auto...

- a.GlossaryTerm
- MC || popupbody
- MC || glossaryterm

and about 100 other places... I basically went on a height: auto and MC_popup_height: auto rampage, to no use.

A mars bar to anyone who can point me in the right direction!

[Harxy]

TO give a little bit more information on the above, the pop-up, when opened, seems to send the mc-popup-height:auto out but gets highjacked by an element.style tag... observe:

<iframe name="MCPopup_0" id="MCPopup_0" class="MCPopupBody" title="Popup" scrolling="auto" frameborder="0" madcap:width="auto" madcap:height="auto" src="file:///C:/Users/harkerpa01/Documents/My%20Projects/Map%20Display/Output/harkerpa01/MyWebHelp/Content/Introduction/../Concepts/Athens.htm?IsTopicPopup=true" style="width: 665.004584px; height: 530.273172px; left: 35px; top: 159px; opacity: 1.1; " madcap:loaded="true"></iframe>

Does anybody have any clue what is going on here?

[Harxy]

I might just be talking to myself here, but even more info:

if I set glossaryterm Madcap-pop-up height to 200px, it picks that up and makes it 200px. But then if I set it to default or auto, it makes this huge 530 px box... any thoughts on this?! Why can I over-ride it with 200px but it's big if it's auto?

I'm confuzzled.

[NorthEast]

I'm actually experiencing the same height issue with glossary popup topics, but only in HTML Help output and not WebHelp output (which seems to work fine with default settings).

I've not worked out how to fix it yet.

[i-tietz]

The popups have the same proportions as the topic that contains the link had when it was loaded.
The proportions, just like size and position of popups, are handled by tons of MadCap javascripts. I already tried to turn a few switches there, but to no avail ...

You can see the change in proportions:
1. Load the topic and click on the popup link.
2. Resize the window to get a narrow but high one.
3. Reload the topic (important - otherwise nothing's going to change).
4. Click on the popup link again.
Now it will have the same narrow and high form as the basic topic.

[NorthEast]

The popups have the same proportions as the topic that contains the link had when it was loaded.
The proportions, just like size and position of popups, are handled by tons of MadCap javascripts. I already tried to turn a few switches there, but to no avail ...

No, you can set the window size for topic popups (and glossary topic popups).

You set the size using the properties mc-popup-width/height; set this for a.Popup (for normal topic popups) or MadCap|glossaryTerm (for glossary topic popups).

It's in the help here:
http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... indows.htm

By default these mc-popup-... sizes are set to auto, so their size will change depending on the size of the help window - which is what you're observing.

One other note, you might get scrollbars if the topic inside the window doesn't fit; e.g. due to tables, images, or any (min-)width/height settings.

[i-tietz]

The popups have the same proportions as the topic that contains the link had when it was loaded.
The proportions, just like size and position of popups, are handled by tons of MadCap javascripts. I already tried to turn a few switches there, but to no avail ...

No, you can set the window size for topic popups (and glossary topic popups).

If I set a fixed size the popups all have the same size, no matter whether they contain one paragraph or half a page (when printed) ...

Sorry to say: We used Robohelp before and RH handled popups a lot better than Flare ever did. With each new Flare version those things are not fixed and we post yet another bug report ...
Our conclusion: MC does not prioritise popups ... although one of the bugs would just take the popups to be positioned 3 pixels further up and further left ... obviously already that is asked too much.

[Harxy]

So are we of the opinion that the fact that if I put mc-popup-height and width to auto it gives me a large popup with white space is a bug? There is no solution to this? For now, I've just styled the height and width as 350*400 but it's not ideal for the smaller glossary definitions.

Oh well </eeyore>

[NorthEast]

So are we of the opinion that the fact that if I put mc-popup-height and width to auto it gives me a large popup with white space is a bug? There is no solution to this? For now, I've just styled the height and width as 350*400 but it's not ideal for the smaller glossary definitions.

Oh well </eeyore>

For me, I got rid of the extra white space on glossary topic popups by setting mc-popup-width/height to auto for the MadCap|glossaryTerm style.

It worked when I applied the setting to that style; it seems that setting it on a.popup just controls 'normal' (not glossary) topic popups.

Anyway, I would put in a bug report if it's not working for you though. Also, make sure you've removed any of the extra styles that you mentioned adding.

[bo0m_king]

Hey Paul/Harxy,
If it's not too much trouble, would you mind sharing your fix for the glossary links with the rest of us?

[garlindj59]

Good morning,

My issue is that the styles for words in the Help glossary are enlarged in the Help page text itself, causing the page content to look distorted. Is there a setting in the online Help output where styles for glossary terms can default to the Help page body text style? Or is this something I have to change in the proxy for the master page?