(Basic Question) How Do I Apply Tag To Content?

resume-writer · Post by **resume-writer** » Wed Jun 18, 2008 6:19 pm

I'm used to working in DreamWeaver's code view. I'm also used to Epic SGML/Frame Structured. Can I apply any of my knowledge to the Flare's XML Editor?

I'm looking at this wonderful set of tags (I guess they're called styles) in the Madcap Flare's Style Sheet. In front of me I have my topic open. I also have my Styles Window open.

Now, How do I apply tags? I just don't get it. I see a Style drop-down, but that just includes the tags that are currently in the topic. How do I access all the tags? I see the tag I want ("ol") in the style sheet.

Also, how do I get a code view?

I've been playing with this Editor for two hours, and can't figure it out. I looked at the tutorials and the online help. I think my question is just too basic.

GregStenhouse · Post by **GregStenhouse** » Wed Jun 18, 2008 7:58 pm

You are in the right place, the "Style" drop down is the easy way to apply styles from the CSS. This is a dynamic list not based on styles used in the current topic, but the type of paragraph or selection in the xml editor.
Usually it lists all "paragraph styles"
If you select part of a paragraph, it will show "character styles"
If you change a paragraph to, say a list (using the button on the Text Formatting toolbar), then it will show all "li" styles

The alternative is to click on the "Toggle Show Blocks" button in the XML Editor. Then click on a block down the left of the editor, and select Style Class > then the style you want. This is how you would change the style for an entire "OL" list.

As far as I know, the equivalent of the "code view" is to right click a topic in the Content Exploroer, and select Open With>Internal Text Editor.

HTH!
Cheers
Greg

Post by **LTinker68** » Wed Jun 18, 2008 8:58 pm

resume-writer wrote:In front of me I have my topic open. I also have my Styles Window open... Now, How do I apply tags?... I think my question is just too basic.

Nope. Of the things people ask about when they're getting started, that's probably the number one question that's been asked in this forum.

Another popular question is about numbering with lists or auto-numbering. Auto-numbering is for more complex numbering schemes (1.1.1, Chapter 2.1, etc.), but if you're doing a simple list (1, 2, 3 or a, b, c) then use the list icon in the toolbar. It behaves a lot better than Word's list icon.

And welcome to the forum!

resume-writer · Post by **resume-writer** » Fri Jun 20, 2008 2:03 pm

So if I use the Text Formatting toolbar, I'm NOT making changes locally? The term formatting scares me because I don't want to format. I want to tag. If I want to change the formatting of the tag, then I'd do so in the style sheet, right? Why don't I get it.

Post by **LTinker68** » Fri Jun 20, 2008 2:49 pm

resume-writer wrote:So if I use the Text Formatting toolbar, I'm NOT making changes locally?

No, you are. But the inline/text formatting options don't extend the entire length of that toolbar. The inline stuff extends from the font list over to the text alignment options. The tag list on the far left and the list items on the far right aren't inline formatting -- they're ways to invoke the tags. The list actions are kind of inline formatting, but not the typical inline formatting, so don't worry about using them.

KevinDAmery · Post by **KevinDAmery** » Mon Jun 23, 2008 5:27 am

It's also not as wonky as Word's inline formatting. With Word, you end up with a new style variant (e.g. Normal + Bold + Vegan + Likes long walks in the rain etc. etc. ad nauseum). With Flare, you end up with inline tags inside your block tag (e.g. <p><b>This is bold</b> this is not</p>) so managing or removing inline styles is less of a hassle.

Ajoten · Post by **Ajoten** » Fri Oct 18, 2013 1:46 am

I have a similar issue now and am still at a loss:

I have a new topic with just an empty <body> tag. I want to insert a <p> element. I can't find a way of doing this.

I have an existing topic with two <p> elements. I want to combine them into a <div>. I can find no way of doing this (just being able to enter a new <div> with no content would be nice).

Getting really aggravated by this now as it's making me feel really stupid.

Post by **Nita Beck** » Fri Oct 18, 2013 6:18 am

Ajoten wrote:I have a similar issue now and am still at a loss:

I have a new topic with just an empty <body> tag. I want to insert a <p> element. I can't find a way of doing this.

I have an existing topic with two <p> elements. I want to combine them into a <div>. I can find no way of doing this (just being able to enter a new <div> with no content would be nice).

Getting really aggravated by this now as it's making me feel really stupid.

Welcome to the forums!

Let me reassure you that you are not stupid, and that there are no stupid questions (as far as I'm concerned; there might be the occasional lazy question... though this isn't one! Anyway...)

The XML Editor does take some getting used to.

If you have a topic with just an empty <body> tag (curious to know how that came to be, by the way), you can easily add a <p> in the XML Editor. Just press Enter. I just tested this, several times, and it worked every time. You could also go into the code and enter the tags.

To put multiple <p> blocks into a <div> using the XML Editor, select those <p> blocks. I just drag over the ones I want to put into a <div>. It's not even necessary to select them in full. Once they are selected, go to the Home ribbon, Paragraph group and click the top-right button, whose tool tip reads "Group". That'll make the <div>. (You can also simply press Tab and select div, though I think that works only if you're starting with <p> blocks and only under certain circumstances. Using Tab following a list, for example, I think ends up making the <p> blocks into list items <li>.)

To create an empty <div>, start with <p> block and then click the Group button, or press Tab and select div.

You can learn more about working with divs and other kinds of groups here: http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... Groups.htm

I hope this helps.

Ajoten · Post by **Ajoten** » Fri Oct 18, 2013 6:51 am

Ah, clever. Thanks!

MatthewWood · Post by **MatthewWood** » Tue Jun 03, 2014 4:15 pm

New user. Extreme frustration!!! My background: 28 years as a tech writer, and years of experience with each of troff, xMetal, Framemaker, and Word. Reading this and other posts, as well as Five Steps to Flare and some Flare documentation, hasn't helped me with the basic question of applying a tag to content when the style I want is not displayed in any style window or panel. I cannot get access to the styles I want to use!

I've been building a custom style sheet from imported Word styles and standard CSS tags, and have most of the styles working.(I want to use this style sheet for multiple projects.) However, when I want do something such as change an entire, existing list to the <p> format, I can't do it!. When on a list item it offers <li> styles. Up a level using the structure bar or arrow key and I'm at the <ol> or <ul> level. Structure bars above that offer nothing of use. The styles pane, the styles drop-down list on the ribbon, and even the right-clicked structure bar all offer the same styles--not the ones I want. Is there the equivalent of Word's Clear Formatting functionality anywhere? Is there any way to display all styles so that I can select the one I want? I know that the xml structure has to be valid, but Flare should not prevent me from making such basic changes.

I'm beginning to think that I should change everything in my Word docs to Normal, import them into new projects, and tag everything using the new styles to avoid problems with re-tagging and legacy garbage!

Also, is there any way to hide selected styles without disabling them? I do not want to clutter my styles palette with styles that I don't use to tag content, but neither do I want to disable styles that might be used by Flare. I do not want to have to scroll to a style. Being able to hide without disabling strikes me as a basic requirement.

Apologies for the frustration, and thanks in advance for any help.

Matt

Post by **NorthEast** » Wed Jun 04, 2014 1:30 am

When on a list item it offers <li> styles. ... The styles pane, the styles drop-down list on the ribbon, and even the right-clicked structure bar all offer the same styles--not the ones I want.

If you add a paragraph inside the list item (Ctrl + ;), then all normal styles will be visible from there, and you can add multiple lines/content inside.

Also, is there any way to hide selected styles without disabling them?

If you want to hide a style in Flare, the option is called 'disable' - so I'm not sure if you've tried it.

On the stylesheet editor toolbar, select Options > Disable styles.

(If you're comfortable with CSS, this is the same as adding mc-disabled: true; to a style.)

ChoccieMuffin · Post by **ChoccieMuffin** » Wed Jun 04, 2014 1:50 am

Firstly, sympathies at the "new user" frustration. It's not so much a learning curve as a vertical cliff, but once you've scaled it you'll be very happy you perservered.

The reason why the styles you want to apply aren't available when your cursor is in a certain position is that it would create invalid HTML, as you identified, so a lot of what you need to do involves playing with the structure bar on the left of the XML Editor screen. But that would still be easier than dumping all of your Word styles.

When you have a list that you want to convert back to regular <p> paragraphs rather than <ol> or <ul> lists, it's actually pretty simple (but only if you know how!) Right-click the structure bar for the list (either ol or ul) and on the menu click Unbind or Unbind list (don't know what the difference is). This now removes the list formatting and converts all the <li> items back to <p> items, with no bounding <ol> or <ul>. That Unbind thing is really handy actually - if you have a span applied to some text that is just junk and not needed (as you often get when importing stuff first of all) you can highlight the span (triple-click, or perhaps double-click - can't remember off the top of my head) and then right-click on the highlighted bit and again click Unbind. I use it lots!

I really share your frustration with having to scroll to find styles. It's a daily pain, several hundred times of day, that when I want to apply a span that I've created, I have to scroll through the list of styles. Unfortunately, if you "hide" a style you do also "disable" it, and I tripped over myself when I hid styles that I don't ever actually apply and my project broke. Took ages to figure out what I'd done! I have put in a feature request to Flare to allow the user to have something like a "favourite styles" menu, but so far it's not there so scrolling it is.

Do ask any questions you have, there is no such thing as a silly question with Flare. And I also suggest you keep looking at the New Posts on this forum. You might not understand everything when you first read it, but having read it you may remember that you read something when it happens that you need to use it. I have learned so much from here, I find it absolutely essential reading every day.

Post by **NorthEast** » Wed Jun 04, 2014 2:37 am

ChoccieMuffin wrote:Unfortunately, if you "hide" a style you do also "disable" it, and I tripped over myself when I hid styles that I don't ever actually apply and my project broke.

But what did you actually do, when you say "hide" and "disable" ?

If you use the Disable styles option (mentioned in my post), this will just hide the style from the Flare interface and style list, but it does not affect the style itself whatsoever - the style is still present and fully-functioning.

ChoccieMuffin · Post by **ChoccieMuffin** » Wed Jun 04, 2014 6:41 am

Can't remember, Dave, it was several versions ago so I gave up on the whole idea because I just couldn't face battling to track down what I'd done! If you say that it IS possible to just hide a style from the UI (so I don't have to scroll several hundred times a day) then I'm definitely giving it a go.

EDIT:

I found this big, fat warning in the Flare help files:
"Even if you have some styles that you never modify, you may want to avoid disabling them in your stylesheet. The reason for this is that disabling a style in a stylesheet also disables its use in the rest of the interface. For example, let's say that you have inserted several images in your project. When you do this, an <img> tag is used. Therefore, although you may never edit the style properties for the <img> tag, you still require it in order to insert images in the future. Otherwise, features such as the option to insert images become disabled in the interface. The bottom line is that you should use caution when disabling styles, making sure that you truly will not need to use those styles."

I traumatised myself the first time by trying to remove styles I never actually applied, including <a>, so my project fell over. Since then I've been very nervous of disabling styles, in case they've been used somewhere in the several tons of stuff that I'm working with. So that's why I've stuck with the unsatisfactory scrolling thing, because even if I were to disable styles I'm certain aren't used, I'd still have to scroll to reach "p.tip" for example.

Post by **NorthEast** » Wed Jun 04, 2014 7:30 am

Yes, you can use it to break the Flare interface, however it shouldn't break your help - that will still build and work perfectly fine.

I would only disable styles to hide them from the style list pickers, i.e. the different places where you can choose a style in the editor.
I typically disable things like abbr, acronym, big; and styles that I've added myself that I don't manually apply (e.g. to fix MadCap output styles).

I would not disable styles just to hide them in the stylesheet editor (CM, this must be what you were doing, since the 'a' tag doesn't appear in style pickers). If you want to hide styles in the stylesheet editor, just tick Hide Inherited.

MatthewWood · Post by **MatthewWood** » Wed Jun 04, 2014 1:47 pm

Thank you all for your responses!

CTRL + ; displays paragraph styles. Great tip! However, if I then highlight an item or block of text and select a paragraph style results are inconsistent. Sometimes it tags as expected; other times it does not. I'll play with this some more as I have not figured out the behavior yet.

I knew about unbinding the span-tagged text, but didn't know that I could unbind other styles. Another great tip! When you click a ul/ol structure bar and unbind it works as I expect, but if I highlight the entire list and right-click > unbind list, it deletes the list items! Very bad behavior--I expected it to unbind, not delete! In my universe, unbind does not mean delete any more than disable means hide.

"hide inherited" is very helpful when in the style editor, but I want to hide styles I don't use in the style pick lists. I've disabled a few styles that I know are not used by the system, but I probably won't disable many more. I saw the big, fat warning about this as well.... Need that Clear Formatting option.

I look forward to looking back on this experience....

Matt

ToddPh · Post by **ToddPh** » Wed Jun 04, 2014 2:04 pm

You might be seeing the difference between inline styles (applied to a character or selection of text within a paragraph) and block styles (applied to an entire paragraph block). I have been confused by the difference more than once in the past when I expected to see paragraph styles when I only had a word selected.

Hope this helps.

Post by **doc_guy** » Wed Jun 04, 2014 6:49 pm

Matt,

It helps if you remember the HTML basis of all Flare work.

In Word/Frame when you want to apply a list, you are really just using a paragraph style with some list formatting and indenting and bullets applied.

In Flare, you actually are using a different element. Instead of <p>, you're actually using <ol> and <li>

So in the source code:

Code: Select all

<p> This is a normal paragraph.</p>
<p class="note">This is a paragraph that has a special class applied to it</p>
<ol>
    <li> This is the first object in a numbered list.</li>
    <li> This is the second object in a numbered list. </li>
</ol>

With that in mind, depending on the element where your cursor is (if nothing is highlighted) the styles window shows you a list of styles that apply to the element you are currently in. If you are in an LI, it will give you classes of LI as well as other universal styles (generic classes in the style sheet). When your cursor is in the paragraph, then the styles window shows you a list of block-level styles including all classes of P, and all headings and classes.

If you are in a list, but you decide it should be a paragraph and not a list, then you need to change the structure of the underlying HTML (XML, really). You'd use ChoccieMuffin's method to convert the list back into a normal paragraph. That would change the structure underneath to something like this:

Code: Select all

<p> This is a normal paragraph.</p>
<p class="note">This is a paragraph that has a special class applied to it</p>
<p>This is the first object in a numbered list.</p>
<p> This is the second object in a numbered list. </p>

And now you can apply paragraph styles to the content.

If you decide that you need multiple paragraphs within a single list item, you can use Dave's suggestion to press Ctrl + ; (Control and semicolon) to convert a list item into a list item with a child paragraph under it, like this:

Code: Select all

<p> This is a normal paragraph.</p>
<p class="note">This is a paragraph that has a special class applied to it</p>
<ol>
    <li>
       <p> This is the first object in a numbered list.</p>
    </li>
    <li> This is the second object in a numbered list. </li>
</ol>

Now press enter after the line, and you get a new paragraph inside the list item:

Code: Select all

<p> This is a normal paragraph.</p>
<p class="note">This is a paragraph that has a special class applied to it</p>
<ol>
    <li>
       <p> This is the first object in a numbered list.</p>
       <p> This is the second paragraph inside the first object in a numbered list.</p>
       <img src="resources/images/image.png" />
       <p class="imagecaption">I can also include images and other elements inside here</p>
    </li>
    <li> This is the second object in a numbered list. </li>
</ol>

When you are ready to move back a level, when you press enter, just click on the yellow left arrow that shows up, and it takes you back to the higher level list and increments the number (if a numbered list). You can also press Shift + Tab (I think) whenever you see that yellow left arrow so you can go up a level in your list.

It's a whole different ball game if you have something highlighted when you try to add a style. If something is highlighted, Flare doesn't look for block-level styles, Flare looks for styles that can be applied through a <span> class. This is essentially equivalent to Character Styles in Word/InDesign. If something is highlighted, you WON'T see block-level styles like P or H1 or any of their classes. So, if you want a paragraph-level style, like a heading, be sure you just click in the paragraph, not highlight the paragraph.

I hope that helps explain a bit about how it works and why; really it is all based on what element you are in when you try to apply the style.

Before you go, let me make sure you get your money's worth from this post. I'll share with you my favorite Flare keyboard Shortcut: CTRL + Shift + h

When you are typing in a paragraph and you want to make it a class of paragraph, or a heading level, just press CTRL + Shift + h, then start typing the style name. If it is a class of P called 'imagecaption', you press CTRL + Shift + h, then type p, then a dot (to represent a class of p) then imagecaption. When you are on the style you want, press Enter. Now you've applied a style to your content without taking your hands off the keyboard.

ChoccieMuffin · Post by **ChoccieMuffin** » Thu Jun 05, 2014 2:03 am

Another place you might find really helpful: http://www.w3schools.com/

I refer to it frequently, very useful resource.

MatthewWood · Post by **MatthewWood** » Thu Jun 05, 2014 3:26 pm

Used the table editor to build a basic and a striped table yesterday, and that seemed easy. The preview looks good, but despite having assigned a background color for the header row, it does not show up in either table when one of the table styles is applied within a topic. I don't see anything I can do differently.

MatthewWood · Post by **MatthewWood** » Thu Jun 05, 2014 3:36 pm

Thanks to all of you! I really appreciate the help. I have a feeling that I am going to be a regular contributor to this forum. Can't wait until I'm answering more questions than I'm asking....

Post by **Nita Beck** » Thu Jun 05, 2014 4:00 pm

Matthew, I feel your "pain" as you climb the Flare learning curve. I've been a tech writer for 33 years (my first development apps were yellow legal pads and pencils; we writers were not allowed to use anything else!), and had used Word for creating documentation since 1985! I adopted Doc-to-Help, a Word add-on, for creating online Help and manuals (rudimentary single-sourcing) around 1995, then moved to RoboHelp in 1997 just for Help and stuck with Word for manuals. Jumped onto the Flare bandwagon at Version 1 in 2006, but really didn't start using it for paying gigs until 2008. In 2008, I made the commitment to migrate all my clients' work to Flare, and I thought I'd be able to pick it up quickly. Wow, was I in for a surprise! It took me a good six months until I felt I knew what I was doing! I relied on the forums a lot.

Anyway, to your question about the table. In your table style, you say you've styled a nice header row but that when you created a table, you didn't see that nice header styling. That's probably because you have not designated the table as having a heading row. For that table, open its Table Properties. (I'm going on memory here...) Someplace on the left side of the Table Properties window, not quite halfway down, you should see a field that lets you set how many header rows there are. By default, it'll be set to 0. Change it to 1 for a single-row header, and then save. Now you should see your pretty header row.

Hope this helps, and keep asking lots of questions. At some point, don't be surprised when you start *answering* questions for the newbies who follow you.

MatthewWood · Post by **MatthewWood** » Thu Jun 05, 2014 5:20 pm

Thanks Nita. Both basic and stripped tables show the header row when previewed in the table editor. Turns out, if you Insert > Table a dialog pops up that enables you to define the number of header rows and if you select 1 (default) and the table style the table displays as expected. However, if you click Insert > Table and click the drop-down to select the number of rows and columns, then apply a table style to the generic table it inserted, no header row is displayed. It may be argued that this latter behavior is correct as only rows and columns can be selected in the matrix, but headers and footers are just different kinds of rows, and when I apply a table style to a table I expect it to render exactly as the style was defined. I think this is a bug. Oh well, at least I understand it now....

Post by **doc_guy** » Fri Jun 06, 2014 8:22 pm

If you prefer, you could add a table to a snippet file, and then place that snippet into your text. The table would already have the header row defined. Then you break the connection with the snippet, and update the content in your table.

Snippets are a great way to add boilerplate text/images/tables that you can then modify once you break the link to the snippet.

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(Basic Question) How Do I Apply Tag To Content?

(Basic Question) How Do I Apply Tag To Content?

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