Styles - Why isn't Styles & Formatting pod showing what's applied?

[Guest]

RH8/Tech Comm Suite 2

WebHelp Pro

Brand, spanking new RH8 project and new CSS that I'm trying to create using RH Styles tool - not an upgrade issue

Hi All,

First time creating a CSS in RH8 (and I'm pretty novice when it comes to CSS). After reading everything I can find about Styles & Formatting in RH8 (Grainge.org included - thank you, Peter!), I still can't figure out something really basic: I built a List Style called "Numbered", it's definitely there in my CSS (shows up in the Styles & Formatting pod and Styles editor where I created it), and it seems to be applying correctly when I select text and then the Numbered list style. But, if I later go back to a topic and want to make sure it was tagged appropriately, when I click the text (none) is what's selected in both the Styles & Formatting pod and the Formatting toolbar. When I look at the HTML, it's applied correctly:

<ol type="1">

<li class="Numbered">First step of procedure here.</li>

<li class="Numbered">Here's the next step</li>

<li class="Numbered">Here's the next step</li>

<li class="Numbered">&#160;</li>

I saw an old post re: a display issue with styles in RH7. Is this still a bug in RH8? Is there anything I can do to display the currently applied style somewhere on the Design side? (I have novice RH users working with me on this project...I can't make them go look at the HTML to see if the right style is applied!)

Second to that, how do I get the Formatting toolbar to show List Styles (seems to be showing Paragraph styles only)? Basically I'd like that box on the Formatting toolbar to show only what I want it to show... about 6 styles total, but some are Paragraph and some are List.

TIA!

Katie Carver

Docs-to-You, LLC

Phoenix, AZ

[Peter Grainge]

"None" is refers to paragraph styles and you have not applied one or there would also be another tag in your HTML such as a <p> tag.

If you look in the style pod with List selected in the dropdown, you should see the class you have used is selected.

You don't have to apply a paragraph style as well as the list style. That is an option for the reasons given on my site under Snippets.

Does that make it clearer?

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Guest]

Thanks, Peter. Ahhh, yes, thank you, that does help me understand what's happening.

The rather annoying thing is that even if "All available styles" is selected at the top of the Styles & Formatting pod, when I select one of the numbered steps it still displays (none). So it seems the only way to confirm the correct List style has been applied from the Design side is to toggle over to displaying List styles only (and then switch back when working on an area of the topic with P tags).

I just wish there was a way to customize the toolbar to show more than the P style. I want to keep this project as simplistic as possible (will be handing it over to the client when finished, and they are not RH savy), so I don't want to create P styles for lists if I don't need them (no output for print required). They are, however, going to be importing quite a bit from Word on an ongoing basis, so I wonder if Li only vs. Li plus P is preferable in that situation (going to do some test Word imports as soon as I get the CSS a little further along). I'm guessing it won't matter either way, but Word import is something I've successfully avoided in all prior projects, so we'll see!

BTW, thanks for pointing out the "Snippets" area of your site... hadn't ever gone there before because I'd assumed it contained info. about the RH Snippets feature :-). You have some great tidbit on there!

Katie

[Peter Grainge]

You can either just suggest the client uses only the style pod or get them to customise the toolbar and remove the dropdown.

Personally I find it quicker to use the dropdown for most things and go to the Style Pod when I need other styles or features such as editing.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge