How to disable manual formatting in RH 11?

[m0jk]

Hi,

I'm wondering if it's possible to disable manual formatting of text in RH11. We want our tech writers to use only the configured styles for text. We don't want them to apply any manual formatting, like bold and italic, to text. The only thing that I could find was hiding the Formatting toolbar, but it's not a solution. I'm looking for sth similar what MS Word offers. There you can disable all the buttons which allow for manual formatting, so that only configured styles can be used to format text.

Thanks.

[Willam_van_Weelden · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, this is not possible. Please submit a feature request with Adobe: Adobe - Site Area Temporarily Unavailable (Note that the form is down at the time of writing. I hope Adobe will have it up again in a couple of days.)

The only thing I found so far is educating users not to use those features. And I have a script to strip out all inline formatting, but that's not a real solution.

[m0jk]

Thank you for the quick response. I really appreciate it.

[m0jk]

One thing came to my mind. Do you know by any chance where RH11 stores its settings regarding toolbars? If they are stored in a file that can be modified, we could hide the formatting toolbar by default and copy this config file to all the computers that have RH11 installed, so that the Formatting toolbar is not visible when RH is opened.

[KimberlyO]

Do your tech writers typically use the buttons on the Format toolbar or just the shortcut keys like CTRL+B, etc.?  As a tech writer who previously used Word, I always used the shortcut keys. At my current job, when I started we used FrameMaker and character formats, so no more use of shortcut keys. Now using RH 10, no more shortcut keys.   Well, I COULD use shortcut keys and then do a quick find and replace later in Notepad++.  Anyhow, what I mean is... if your tech writers are used to shortcut keys, hiding the formatting toolbar isn't going to stop the inline formatting.

[m0jk]

That's true, hiding the Formatting toolbar won't stop them from using manual formatting, but it may be less tempting for them to do so when the toolbar is not visible Looks like the only way is to hope that nobody uses the manual formatting.

[m0jk]

Willam,

Is there any chance you could share this script? At least, we could check if any manual formatting was done on a project.

[Willam_van_Weelden]

I'll make a small update to the script later to display all topics that have inline formatting. It may be several days before I get to this though.

[m0jk]

Thanks. When it's ready, please let me know. I really appreciate your help

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

You could also create a “template” workspace environment that hides stuff & then circulate that file. I know in FM the files are .cfws type files – have a look in your local appdata folder

[m0jk]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the response. It looks like the preferences regarding toolbars aren't stored in the workspace file. When I switch between workspaces, the toolbars remain the same. I looked inside the workspace file (.rhs) and it looks like there are only settings for pods.

[Captiv8r]

Many of the preferences are stored in the Windows registry,

Cheers... Rick

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Sorry, worth a shot ;>)

It kind of sounds like you’re trying to do structured authoring using RH, which I’ve never heard being used in that way. Maybe you need to consider using something like structured Framemaker, FM12 XML Author or Oxygen.

[m0jk]

We're just trying to keep our styles consistent, therefore we want to get rid of manual formatting and use only styles. That's mostly it

[Willam_van_Weelden]

As promised, here is the script: inlineStylingReporter.jsx

Import the script and run it. To keep it generic, I've added to question popups to allow you to choose the level of detail.

The script doesn't change anything in the project, it adds a list of topics and snippets with inline styling in the output view. It's safe to run without creating a backup first.

Kind regards,

Willam

[m0jk]

Thanks a million Willam. I imported and ran it. It works perfect.

I really appreciate your help!