Difficulty applying span classes

[RiverMonster]

Hi,

After spending my life with FrameMaker I am now getting to grips with Flare (v4.1). I have been playing around with applying span styles and seen some behavior that is rather strange to me.

Flare allows you to select styles in a number of ways e.g. the drop-down list on the toolbar, F12 style window, Ctrl-shift-H style picker window... Let's call these style lists. With the cursor in a word you are able to open any style list and select a class appropriate to the tag the word is in (e.g. if I am in a p tag I can then select p.note). However, if instead you want to select a span class (character style) you first need to select some characters/words. When you do this the style lists change to show available span classes. Up to here everything is working as expected.

Now, select all the words in a line and open the style lists. They still show the tag classes rather than the span classes. There is therefore no way to apply a span style to all words in a sentence via the Flare interface without first adding a space at the end of the line and applying the tag to everything except the space. To me, this is not expected behavior. I would expect that the act of selecting words (even if I select all of them in a sentence) lets Flare know that I want to apply a span style; if I had wanted to apply a paragraph class etc I would have just left the cursor in the line without anything selected. The help file says this
Characters (i.e., selected text):
Highlight all characters within a paragraph that you want to be affected by the style, without selecting the entire paragraph.
So it sounds like this is by design. Is this due to some limitation or recommendation on XML/CSS usage or just the way Flare designed it?

If the need for applying a char style to all words in a line occurs a lot for a project then I guess you would just create a paragraph style for that situation, but if you want the flexibility to have all span classes available for all paragraph styles then that approach is not really feasible.

Thanks,

Adrian

[KevinDAmery]

Hi, Adrian,

The behaviour you're seeing is by design: it allows users to apply a style to the entire block without have to go to the block select method (so for example if you have "show blocks" turned off you don't have to turn it back on to be able to apply a paragraph style instead of a span style). The thinking is that most of the time if someone selects all of the text in a paragraph they're intending to apply a paragraph style rather than a span style.

Here's something you can do to get the best of both worlds, though: you can create generic classes. A generic class can be applied to any tag at all (spans, paragraphs, divs, you name it).

Unfortunately, Flare doesn't yet allow us to create generic classes in the stylesheet editor, so you have to open the stylesheet in a text editor to do it. Here is an example generic class from my stylesheet.

Code: Select all

.heavy
{
	font-weight: bold;
}

I wouldn't make *everything* a generic class - only styles that you might want to apply to many different styles (spans, lists, paragraphs, headings, etc.)

[RiverMonster]

Thanks for the tip Kevin; I'll take a look at generic classes.

Cheers,

Adrian

[alaltenburg]

On the topic of generic classes, I have set up 3 generic classes as follows

.leftAlign
{
margin-right: 10px;
float: left;
}

.centerAlign
{
text-align: center;
}

.rightAlign
{
margin-right: 10px;
float: right;
}

I want to apply these to my pictures with attached captions. Is there a way to apply these generic codes without going through the internal text editor? When I right click on the div or p in the block bar, they do not show up like the class codes.

Thank you,
Andrea

[KevinDAmery]

What I do is leave the Styles window open docked to the right side of the interface. This window shows all of the classes that can be applied. The right click context menu, otoh, only shows the classes that are specific to the current style (i.e. for a p style it only shows p classes, whereas the style window shows p classes and generic classes).

[alaltenburg]

I didn't even think they would be in there, but low and behold, there they are. Thank you so much for the assistance.