Table Styles Mystery

[TechWriter85]

Hello.

My company is moving from FrameMaker to Flare and Flare is new to me. I am watching the online videos, but in the meantime I need to produce actual work despite not knowing Flare well. Currently, I am mystified about this table behavior:

When I put the cursor in one row of a table, I see my ordinary paragraph styles in the Styles pane to the right. They come from our big, overall .css file.

When I put the cursor in the following row, I see the drastically limited list of styles from the table.css. I would prefer to use this .css for the tables, seems logical to me, but I don't know how to make it apply consistently to the table.

How do I get one .css style to apply consistently to a table?

Thanks.

[doc_guy]

The styles that appear are based on the tag your cursor is in. So if you have a <p> inside the <td> element, then you will see all your paragraph styles. If you have just a <td> with no paragraph, then you'll just see styles that can be applied to the <td> element (which would basically be any class you've created of TD, as well as any generic styles).

Also important to note: if you have a character/word/sentence/etc. selected, you will see inline styles (styles that can be applied via the <span> tag, or styles like the <b> and <i> tags). If you just have your mouse pointer in a paragraph or block of text, you will see styles that apply to the block. I have no idea how much you know about HTML/XML, so I'll add this in case it is helpful: If that is not a concept that is familiar to you, I recommend reading this article: https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_blocks.asp

[Nita Beck]

And if you’re trying to add content in a cell that doesn’t have a paragraph inside it, on the Table ribbon, look for the Cell Content Style (or something like that; I’m on my iPad at the moment), which will let you select a paragraph style; Flare will then nest a paragraph with that style applied inside the cell.

[TechWriter85]

Thank you, Nita. I finally got back to this question!
I used Cell Content Style, but I find that it applies to every paragraph in a cell. I have a table that follows this pattern:

Title of Something in column 1 Definition introductory sentence in Column 2 ending in colon:
--Bulleted item 1 of definition
--Bulleted item 2 of definition
--Bulleted item 3 of definition


In the cell in Column 2, I would like to use p.CellBody for the introductory sentence, and p.CellBullet for the bulleted items under it. I can 't find a way to do this.l Can you use different styles within one table cell?

Thanks.

[doc_guy]

Once you've got the <p> tag in the cell, you can add all kinds of content, lists, etc.

If you don't have the <p> tag in the cell, just press enter. The p tag will be added automatically. Now press backspace, and you're back on the first line, but the <p> tags stays.

Now, right click on the p block in the side bar (or, with your cursor in the p block, but with nothing selected, use keyboard shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + H ) and you can apply a class of paragraph. Then insert a bulleted list.

The cool thing is that with CSS, you don't even need to create a p.CellBody or bullet or whatever. You can target paragraphs in a cell by using this in your style sheet:

td p {
property: value;
}

That will only target paragraphs that are descendant elements of the TD tag. No need to create a special class for paragraphs in cells, just target them specifically. Lists are the same thing:

td li {
property: value;
}

Or if you want to apply the style to the outside of the list (but not between the rows, for example), you could do this:

td ol, td li {
property:value;
}

Which is precisely what we have done here: