Adding Auto text entries

[CPortals]

While adding a background colour to text, the text is highlighted and not the entore paragraph. If I have butted points, the the background colour is applied only to the text where as the lines where I have pressed the Enter key remain white. How to add background fill colour or add a text box with fill colour as an autotext entry or to a style sheet.

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi CPortals and welcome to the forums. It's not entirely clear to me what you are asking. Do you want a colour to be applied to the entire topic background or to a specific part of it? If you want to apply a colour to the background, you can set this via your style sheet. If you open it, you'll see a style called "Background & Text". If you modify the font of this style by adding a highlight colour this is applied to the background of all topics. If you require something else, please come back with some clarification.

[CPortals]

Hi Colum and thanks for your suggestion.

I want to create a "Notes" section in my help and want to apply a background only to this section. I tried to apply the colour through Format-->Borders&Shading. But only the text is highlighted.I want the entire section to be filled witht the colour selected. The alternateI found was inserting a text box and applying "Fill" to the box. But I cant add the text box to a style sheet and would have to repeat this process manually for each topic. Is there a better way to achieve this?

[Guest]

Hi CPortals,

You could always define a new style (or styles) for your Notes section and set the background colour for the new style. That should give you want you want.

Anne

[Chet Zeshonski]

You can define a style that applies a background color to the paragraph, but it will NOT mesh well with a bulleted list. (I'm confident you meant "bulleted lists" when you wrote "butted points" in the first post.) I suggest that you avoid using bulleted lists in your notes.

[Guest]

Chet,

You're quite right! I should have experimented a bit more before making my suggestion.

The only solution seems to be to put the notes in a table with a background colour or, as CPortals suggests, a text box with a background colour. Not entirely satisfactory, but at least it's a solution of sorts.

Anne

[HKabaker]

Tables would be a good way to go, I believe.

I've noticed that some Web-based applications make very heavy use of tables to manage page design and layout for background colors, image placement, lining up modules, and so on. Html wasn't built for such fine control.

Harvey

[CPortals]

So there is no way to add a custom style for inserting a table in the style sheet. I will have to manually insert a table to each topic which has notes?

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

Preformatted tables in RoboHelp can go some way towards defining the appearance of a table but not what styles are used. What you could do is use Macro Express. You would create the table once and then lift the code from the true code view into a macro. Next time you want a table, you simply go into true code and run the macro. Back in WYSIWYG you will see the table you want.

As to defining the styles, a visit to http://www.w3schools.com/ might help.

[CPortals]

Thanks Peter! I built the macro using macro express as you suggested. Is there a freeware availble similar to macro express.

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi CPortals. No doubt you could find a freeware macro application if finance is an issue. It may even do most of what Macro Express does. If you can afford it the few shekells that you have to pay to register Macro Express are worth it.