Cannot see all styles - I want a full Paragraph Catalog!

[milkor]

How do I see all of the styles that are in my stylesheet in the Styles window? I only see "related" styles when my cursor is in a paragraph. For example, if my cursor is in a list paragraph, I only see other list styles.

I created my CSS stylesheet entirely within Flare, not manually within a text editor. I can't see why everything that is in the CSS is not showing up in the Styles window.

What I want is to have a Paragraph Catalog that lists ALL of my styles, not just some of them, just like in FrameMaker. MS Word lets you see all of the styles available in your document, too. Surely Flare has a way to do this? Restricting the list of styles available depending on what paragraph type you're clicked in is not helpful, it's a hindrance.

Thanks!

[i-tietz]

Post a bug report: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback/bugs.aspx

The list of tags classes and styles is even more "castrated" inside dropdowns or tables ... e.g.: no heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) available inside a dropdown.
Even if the short list is supposed to "help" dummy users : At least I want a switch that allows me to switch to the full list ...
I keep reporting it since Flare V3, but obviously we're not yet enough for it to be fixed.

[crdmerge]

Ctrl+Shift+H

[i-tietz]

Ctrl+Shift+H

duh ...
or F12 ...
Same outcome: castrated list of tags/classes/styles ...

[crdmerge]

Except that the Style Picker (Ctrl+Shift+H) goes away on its own after you make your selection and press Enter. The Styles window (F12), on the other hand, must be manually closed to regain the real estate that it has grabbed.


Leon

[milkor]

Alas, none of those worked! They displayed what I already see, the Styles pane, and a "castrated" list of styles, not a full paragraph catalog à la FrameMaker. Thanks for trying, though!

[Jo Levitt]

If more people asking for this is what it takes then I add my vote.

[RamonS]

Submit a report here
https://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/Submit.aspx

Otherwise it won't be counted.

[crdmerge]

milkor, what's this?

a full paragraph catalog à la FrameMaker

In Flare neither the Style Picker nor the Styles window will offer any styles not in your project.

In either interface, I see all the styles that are in my .css style sheet (all divs, all headings, all p classes, and all pre classes).

[kwag_myers]

Except that the Style Picker (Ctrl+Shift+H) goes away on its own after you make your selection and press Enter. The Styles window (F12), on the other hand, must be manually closed to regain the real estate that it has grabbed.


Leon

If you use two screens, you can undock the Style Window by grabbing the upper-right corner of the container and dragging it to your #2 screen. If you switch to single screen, Flare is smart enough to bring the container into view (not everyone does that and the container displays off-screen).

[i-tietz]

milkor, what's this?

a full paragraph catalog à la FrameMaker

In Flare neither the Style Picker nor the Styles window will offer any styles not in your project.

??
I don't understand what your comment has to do with the quote.

In either interface, I see all the styles that are in my .css style sheet (all divs, all headings, all p classes, and all pre classes).

Really?
Have you tried inside a dropdown? Or inside a table? Or inside a list?

[HyperMom]

I just started using Flare. I'm a RoboHelp longtimer. I've imported my project no problem. My .css/styles seemed to be present at first. And then I started having this same issue.

No matter what or where I am, I don't have the styles available to me, and there was no pattern as to which styles were appearing and which ones were not!

I was glad to read this and find out that it wasn't me and my lack of knowledge. I just got a ton of books out of the library on .scc/styles, and I've been watching the videos and reading the User Guide.

Now, I'm wondering what I'm going to do to get around this. My online help now looks terrible!!

I'm going to report this bug now.

Thanks for the heads up!

Mary

[i-tietz]

I'm afraid the only thing you can do is insert the classes and tags in the html source of the topics:
Context menu of the topic in the Content Explorer -> Open with | Internal Text Editor
At least I didn't find another way to solve that.

I also have snippets that consist of heading tags with dummy text to insert them into a dropdown or a table. That means I only have to enter that workaround in the HTML code once. Maybe you could do that for your missing tags and classes, too? Might not work anywhere, but saves you time and nerves.

[Msquared]

I'm a Flare newbie too, so I may be talking through the hole in my head, but I too was initially very disappointed to only find paragraph styles shown when I wanted list styles. Then I did a bit of a context shift in my head, since this is HTML after all, and I've worked in Word for years and years. Perhaps things are different?

If some text is formatted as an HTML paragraph, why should you expect to apply list styles to it? List styles are only valid for HTML list entities. Looked at in that way, it makes sense to only show the styles that are valid for that entity. In Word, for example, you wouldn't expect to be able to convert text to a table just by applying a style to it - you would first need to convert it to a table, then apply the styles. I guess HTML is the same - if you have a paragraph, it isn't a list and needs to be converted to one before you can apply list styles.

However, I then made this much better for me by discovering that you can format both bulleted lists and numbered lists as paragraph styles instead, without using the list tags at all. So I can now move freely between straight paragraphs, bulleted lists and numbered lists without needing to select or clear a list formatting option first.

However, I wonder whether Mary may have a different problem. I also kept losing styles that should have been there. In my case, this was because I was editing the CSS file directly in a text editor. Sometimes I made a mistake and missed off a semi-colon, or did something else wrong. In that case, Flare does show you an error message in the message window at the bottom of the screen, but it's easy to miss. If there is an error in your CSS file, you will lose all the styles after the error.

[i-tietz]

And why can't I have a heading tag in a dropdown?

[LTinker68]

And why can't I have a heading tag in a dropdown?

Well, for one thing, even if you did, it wouldn't look like the heading tag anyway, unless you generally create pseudo-classes for your heading tags. Seems like most people wouldn't and the heading tags would just be straight text. The drop-down hotspot, though, is clickable, so you either go with the default hyperlink styles or create a new class anyway to control how the hyperlink states look. So if you want a drop-down hotspot to look like a heading, then create a class of the drop-down hotspot tag and style it to look like your heading tag, although I wouldn't make it look exactly like your heading tag -- there has to be some visual clue to the end user that this heading tag, unlike others, is clickable.

[i-tietz]

So if you want a drop-down hotspot to look like a heading,

I didn't mean as a DDhotspot, I mean inside a DDbody.

[LTinker68]

So if you want a drop-down hotspot to look like a heading,

I didn't mean as a DDhotspot, I mean inside a DDbody.

I just did a quick test and was able to have a heading in a drop-down body. I wrote my clickable text in a paragraph, followed it with an h2 tag, followed it with a normal paragraph, selected all three, inserted the drop-down effect, and my heading tag and regular paragraph were preserved in the dd effect beneath the clickable text. I don't know if that always worked, but it works in v8.

[i-tietz]

I mean: Inserting a heading into a dropdown body, not into normal text that is to become a dropdown body.

And, NO, it is no option to do it the other way round because we have classes that have to be applied to dropdowns and I generated snippets to reduce the error rate of my colleagues. Apart from that we very often just copy another dropdown from the same topic, paste it into the wanted position, delete the unwanted content and write new content.
Apart from that we have nested dropdowns and we would have to go a long way unbinding a dropdown up to the top level and afterwards rebinding them again and assign all the right classes to the right dropdowns all over again.

And all that effort because of a 100% senseless restriction MC built into Flare. NOBODY was able so far to explain the castrated list of tags and classes inside a dropdownbody.
It seems it was an arbitrary decision of some lone developer who thought that ALL users desperately need to be guided through the Flare environment safely by sparing them a few completely redundant alternatives.
Maybe that developer knows a lot of people who don't want to do a lot of thinking or people who are not able to, but I AM! I don't need anybody else to do the thinking and deciding for me.

[LTinker68]

I mean: Inserting a heading into a dropdown body, not into normal text that is to become a dropdown body.

Oh, you mean trying to add one after you've created the drop-down. Yes, that appears to be a bug, since you can have a heading tag in the effect if it's there before the effect is built. I guess it could be by design (not being able to add a heading), the idea being that drop-down effects are just for paragraphs (i.e., simple text) and togglers are for a mix of tags, but that's just a guess on my part. If that is by design, it wasn't completely implemented, since, again, you can have a heading in the effect if it's there before you create the effect.

[i-tietz]

If that is by design, it wasn't completely implemented, since, again, you can have a heading in the effect if it's there before you create the effect.

Precisely. That's why I wrote about the lone developer ... Believe me, I know what I'm talking about - I deal with that sort of developer every day. They're making lone decisions not asking anybody else about it and ignoring the error ticket, because they don't consider it an error.