Cannot define style for following paragraph

[Douglas_Campbell]

I am trying to clean up the behavior the styles in a template I am creating and this has become a universal problem. I will give a specific example to illustrate. I am trying to create styles for a glossary and I want to create two paragraph styles:

glossary_entry

glossary_definition

In the edit styles dialogue box for glossary_entry, I want to set Style: / (Style for following paragraph) with the glossary_definition paragraph style. This would mean that after you choose glossary_entry and hit enter, it automatically brings up the glossary_definition style on the next line.

However, when I choose any style that I have created, the style always reverts to the default RH Normal style. Actually, it will work if I choose other/any RH default styles (ex. Heading 1), but never if I choose a paragraph style I created.

You can also choose No Change and it will just repeat the style in question. But this is annoying, as there are many styles I have created that I do not want to repeat. For example, I have a warning element, but I don't want it to keep creating warning elements with every carrriage return. Instead, I want it to return to the standard paragraph style I created.

Not being able to choose paragraph styles makes no sense to me, especially since all the paragraph styles I created appear as options in the Style: / (Style for following paragraph) drop down box.

Can someone please tell me if this is a glitch or what I can do to fix this issue?

Thanks in advance,

Douglas

[FirstScript]

Douglas,

You should be able to fix this with a minor modification to your CSS file. If you add the x-next-class parameter to the glossary_definition section, the next paragraph should pick up the style you define.

The CSS entries for your pararaph styles should probably look something like this:

p.glossary_definition {

    font-family: <font>;

    font-size: <size>;

    x-next-class: glossary_entry;

}

p.glossary_entry {

    font-family: <font>;

    font-size: <size>;

}

[Douglas_Campbell]

Thought I should follow up to share the root cause of this problem, at least in my case. Apparently RH does not like symbols and characters other than the basic alphanumeric variety. I had prepended all my styles with "!" to get them to appear at the top of the styles list and not mix them in with the RH default styles. I had also used underscore symbols between multiple words in the style name. For some reason, the error message that lead me to discover this did not appear until I tried forcing the style with FirstScript's CSS hack:

A style name cannot contain spaces and cannot begin with a digit. Also a style name containing anything but the letters and a-z and digits will not work in browsers other than IE.

I was aware that there couldn't be any spaces, but thought that the underscores were an acceptable work around. I don't think these limitaiton are fully detailed in the RH documentation.

[Willam_van_Weelden]

Hi,

This is a limitation of the HTML standard, not a limitation of RoboHelp. Multiple classnames are seperated by spaces, but underscores are allowed. The limitations are as follows:

• Letters, numbers, underscores and hyphens are allowed in style names.
• You must start a class name with a letter, an underscore or a hyphen.
• Class names are case sensitive.

Greet,

Willam