Project Styles

In Doc-To-Help, styles can control the look of your output, as well as the behavior. See Styles.

Doc-To-Help includes many predefined styles. The Project Styles dialog is used to modify these character styles, paragraph styles, and topic types, or to add new styles to the project. If you create a new style and want it to employ a special authoring behavior, you must define those behaviors in this dialog. Styles that are created strictly for formatting do not need to be added here.

  • Character styles are used to apply formatting to specific text within a paragraph. For example, you may want to add topic links, conditional text, glossary terms, or keywords to enhance your project. Character styles allow you to create these types of hot spots and more using Doc-To-Help Markup Language (D2HML). See Character Styles and Doc-To-Help Markup Language.
  • Paragraph styles are used to assign specific behaviors to entire paragraphs. For example, Doc-To-Help built-in heading styles specify the structure and hierarchy of your topics in targets and the generation of automatic subtopic links for them. They also control the structure of the automatically created table of contents for both online and manual targets. See Paragraph Styles.

  • A topic type is a named collection of topic attributes: what window the Help topic appears in, the navigation for the topic, whether it is automatically added to the index, etc. Paragraph styles can have topic types assigned to them. If they do, the topic type properties override any duplicate paragraph style properties. If a paragraph style property is overridden in this way, it will be grayed out in the Project Styles dialog. See Topic Types.

    A topic type can also be used to customize an individual topic, overriding the style properties. See Viewing/Changing Topic Properties.

  1. Select the Project ribbon.
  2. Click the Styles button. The Project Styles dialog opens.
  3. In the left panel, click the Add New Style drop-down.
  4. From the list, choose Paragraph Style, Character Style, or Topic Type. The Add New Style dialog opens.
  5. Enter the new name and choose to either use the default style properties, or copy the properties from an existing style.

  6. Click OK.  The new style is added to the list.

    The style can be further customized by editing the fields. If you added a new paragraph style and chose "Use default properties," by default its type is Body Text. This should be changed to the appropriate type to activate it. For more information on each type, see Paragraph Styles.

  1. Select the Project ribbon.
  2. Click the Styles button. The Project Styles dialog opens.
  3. In the left panel, choose the style or topic type you’d like to edit.
  4. Make the desired changes to the style or topic type.

  5. Click OK.

    If you would like to edit the name of the window, edit the Name field in the Basic section.

  1. Select the Project ribbon.
  2. Click the Styles button. The Project Styles dialog opens.
  3. In the left panel, choose the style or topic type you’d like to remove.

  4. Select Remove Style.

    Note If a style or topic type has a padlock icon next to it in the Project Styles dialog, that style or topic type is built-in and cannot be deleted.

  5. Click OK.

Character Styles

Paragraph Styles

Topic Types

C1H Conditional

Heading 1

Conceptual

C1H Contents Title

Heading 2

Contents

C1H Context ID

Heading 3

Glossary of Terms

C1H Dropdown Text

Heading 4

Glossary Term Definition

C1H Expand Text

Heading 5

Margin Note

C1H Group

MidTopic

Procedural

C1H Group Invisible

RelatedHead

Sub-Contents

C1H Group Link

WhatsThis

What’s This

C1H Index

Glossary Heading

 

C1H Index Invisible

Glossary Heading (no auto links)

  

C1H Inline Dropdown

    

C1H Inline Expand

    

C1H Inline Popup

    

C1H Jump

    

C1H Keyword Link

    

C1H Link Tag

    

C1H Link Tag Invisible

    

C1H Manual

    

C1H Online

    

C1H Popup

    

C1H Popup Text

    

C1H Topic Properties

    

C1H Variable

    

Note It is important that you use the Project Styles dialog to define authoring behaviors for any styles you add when creating a custom template. If you do not do this, the styles will not function correctly when building output. See Editing a Template.