Steve Salter

Flare uses cascading style sheets to apply formatting.

Unfortunately, the similarity between a word processes and the Flare interface is setting the new user up for a shock. At the top left of screen you have a dropdown list of styles, similar to Microsoft Word. There is a styles pane, where the styles applicable to the tag you’re in are listed (and there’s the first trap). You can select some text and apply a style, just like your favourite word processing application.

What’s different is Flare’s using a web compliant standard known as cascading style sheets. Sure, those of us with enough grey in our hair can remember the earliest versions of word where you selected a block and applied markups to control formatting, but Word has hidden all that from the user.

We all know the reason for using a style, rather than applying inline formatting. If we use a style, and want to update that style, we can go to the style sheet and change it once. Everywhere the style is used is updated on the next refresh. If we used inline styles we would have to proof read the entire project, changing instances of the old style to the new.

And, to be fair, Word does let you do that.

The trouble is Word creates printed documents, and isn’t designed to create online help. Okay, you can save it as rich text, use certain hidden styles and feed it through the Microsoft Help Workshops to create HTML help, but it’s not a very intuitive process.

So, because Flare makes HTML help (and other online help) as well as printed documentation we have to get used to using web standards – HTML is a web standard as well.

Remember I said “there’s the first trap”? A common question on the Flare forum is “Where did my style go?”. If you create a custom style in Flare it will create a class for the parent tag selected at the time. Confused? Try this:

1. Select a paragraph
2. Make sure the styles pane is open ([F12] if it isn’t) and click Create Style

A create style dialog box opens

1. Name the style
2. Select the style sheet where you want the new style
3. Make sure Create style and update the source element is selected
4. Click Okay

I named my style Look, I want it to grab people’s attention.

You can now create the style format (this is one way, there are others):

1. Place the cursor in a paragraph you’re going to format as Look
2. Select p.Look in the styles pane
3. Click Edit Style

The style sheet editor will open.

1. Select Look (it’s under the p element, click the + to expand)
2. Expand the font properties
3. Set color to red
4. Set font-weight to bold
5. Save the stylesheet

When you go back to your topic, the selected paragraph id bold and red.

And that should be the end of it….

…Untill you want to apply the style to a list item.

You select a list item, look in the styles pane and see nothing. Your look style isn’t there.

What you need is a generic class.

The easiest way is to modify the style sheet using a text editor:

1. Backup your stylesheet
2. Right click the style sheet in the content explorer
3. Select open with
4. Click Internal Text Editor
5. Scroll down to p.Look

1. Delete the p
2. Save the style sheet

Now when you select a list item you can see the Look class.

In fact, .Look is available all the time – it’s now a generic class. Of course, you could straight out add it to your style sheet in your favourite text editor. Which. now you know about generic classes, is probably what you’re going to do.