An important part of technical writing is numbering. You don’t have to look far in the Tech Com world to find frustration with an application’s ability to handle numbering – and if you’re using Word you know what I mean. (I’m using Word in my paid job…)
Flare is quite adept at numbering – when you know how. In this first of maybe many blogs I want to examine numbering using complex selectors and the style sheet.
It is quite simple to create an ordered list – one that numbers the items. (An unordered list is one that most of us refer to as “dot points”.)
Just type your list item and apply the numbering from Flare’s format toolbar.
But, what if you want 2 levels to your list?
That’s easy – the Flare Stylesheet Editor is set up to allow you to format the complex selector ol ol – the one that sets the style for the second level of numbering.
Here I’ve set my lower level to lower case alphabetical characters. And the result:
![A 2 level ordered list in Flare's XMLEditor](http://stevesalter.net/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/list3.jpg" "2 level ordered list")
So far, so good. The Flare interface has allowed me to create 2 depths to my list. But wait, I want more!
You’d be right in guessing I need a complex selector ol ol ol. Trouble is, the Flare stylesheet editor doesn’t have it! We can overcome this limitation using our favourite text editor. Open the stylesheet and enter the following at the bottom (I’m using Notepad++):
You can either add the formatting for the third level in the text editor, or you can save the stylesheet and open it with Flare’s stylesheet editor to format the level you just created. I’m using lower case roman for my third level:
Once you have set up your stylesheet, you can control your numbered list using the indent button on a list item.
Thanks for the information in this post; it was a big help in assisting my stylesheet cleanup for Flare (was using RH X3). However, I wonder if you have ever encountered the problem I am now having? I have defined the complex selector ul ul ol with one attribute, list-style-type: lower-alpha. However, when rendered by the Flare preview, this level of list shows as an unordered rather than an ordered list. Nothing I have tried corrects this issue. Do you have any ideas?
I suspect when you are applying the list levels you are using the indent command (or tab button) and it is applying the complex selector UL UL UL to your list. If you haven’t defined UL UL UL it will get it from the Flare style sheet that provides ‘missing’ styles – you can’t edit it as far as I know.
The only way I can get it to work is to open the topic in a text editor (I use Notepad++) and clean up the code by hand.
You could try the Flare user’s forum – there are lots of people doing all sorts of things and they might have a more elegant solution!
Cool!
In case you don’t want to stick to a fixed list type for the second or third level, you can quickly change the type of list for any ol/ul on your page.
Just right-click the ol/ul block in the tag bar (on the right side of the page), choose Type and select any one of the presented list types (bullets, numbered, Lower-alpha, …).
Hi, Steve and other Flarites. Your blog turned up when I Googled on “Flare”. I am a newby to Flare and pretty green. I am hoping you can answer a question for me; I could not find it addressed in the Flare documentation or elsewhere on the Net. I registered for Madcaps Flare Forum, but prob won’t get activated till tomorrow.
Anyway, here’s my problem. I used the Stylesheet editor to make some font family and font size changes to a few paragraph styles. But when I previewed topics, the changes were not reflected.
One thing that was confusing was the confirmation dialog with four options when I went to save my changes to the style, sheet. If you don’t “break” the connection to the source document, you get this confirmation dialog every time you save changes to the style sheet, which is a pain. I figured if I “broke” the connection, but then reimported the FM source and respecified the style sheet, the new settings would take effect; but not so.
So, what is the correct way to make edits to a style sheet and then make those changes take effect and show up in the Topic previews? Much thanks for any guidance you can provide.
- Bernie Meyer