Changing the appearance of some text.

[Kat se gat]

If my screenshot makes it through take a look at it as I'd appreciate some guidance. There are some pieces of text I'd like to add a red border around. In the screenshot I cobbled this together with SnagIt for demonstration purposes. The thing I want to do in Flare is to have some kind of style (?) where I can highlight the text and wave a magic wand and let Flare put the red border around the text I've selected. Elsewhere in a document I'd need to select a different bit of text and do the same.

I don't mind taking the boat out to sea and doing my own fishing but could someone perhaps tell me how I'd get started and where I can look for examples.

Ta.

[atomdocs]

You can do this by creating a span class and configuring it to display a border. You can then highlight the desired words in a sentence and apply your span.

[Kat se gat]

Thank you very much, Major Tom.

Ground control.

[atomdocs]

Does it work for your project?

I think my stylesheet knows which way to go.

[Kat se gat]

I came close to doing it but I taco'ed my project without a backup. I need to experiment on a test project. I couldn't quite get things right in the style editor. A bit more persistence and I might work it out.

[Kat se gat]

See screenshot. I added a new subclass to "span" called RedBorder. I can set the type and font etc but there's no facility in the tabs to change the border properties. If I look at one of the paragraph class "p" subclasses it contains a borders tab on the left-side of the dialog. Problem is, I want to apply the styling to words in a paragraph, not to the paragraph itself. The best I can get with my new span subclass is to set the colour of the text and its background colour; not quite what I had in mind. I'm happy with the Courier New type that I changed it to but the red background isn't what I had in mind. I'll persevere with it but I might need a Flaremeister to explain it to me.

Edit: I think, writes he giving himself an attaboy slap on the back that I worked it out. I had to click on the advanced view for my new subclass and then I could set the border colour and width of the border's sides. There's a danger, it might be working now.

[Kat se gat]

Almost there and here's the latest state-of-the-nation address. See the screenshot.

As you can see, there's a slight amount more whitespace below the text than there is above it. My screenshot was lassoed from a PDF output file. I can live with the slight imbalance and maybe I'm just being a bit anal about it but can you nudge the border up a little? Perhaps it's a PDF problem? Inside Flare, the two textboxes just show their borders without touching each other as I'm in paragraph edit mode. In the PDF (or any output type) I'd like to be ultra neat and try and show the borders with a bit of whitespace between them rather than have them stacked on top of each other. Of course, I didn't know that would happen until I generated my output file and then viewed it. If I could change the border slightly at source then maybe the PDF output would look just-so. While we're at it, is it possible to change the border so it has a little more whitespace at the beginning and end, hopefully without nudging the border so it doesn't poke the words fore and aft in the eye?