Where's My Style?

When applying styles to content, you may notice from time to time that the style you are looking for is not available from the drop-down list or Styles window pane when you try to select it.

This can occur if the style exists in a particular medium (e.g., print) but not in the default medium. So if you are working in the XML Editor with the medium set to default and you attempt to apply that style to content, you won't see it in the selection list with all of the other styles. To correct this, make sure the style exists in the default medium as well. See Creating Selectors, Mediums and Media Queries, and Selecting Mediums and Media Queries.

Another possible reason for this has to do with the location of the cursor in the topic. Flare realizes where the cursor is placed and knows that only certain styles should be applied at that location.

Example — Lists

Your cursor is on a regular paragraph and you want to apply a list style to it in order to turn it into the beginning of a bulleted list. Because it is not yet a list item, but rather a simple paragraph, you won't see your list style in the Styles window pane when you try to select it. Instead, you see several paragraph styles. In order to use the list style, you first need to turn the paragraph into a bulleted list item, by opening the Home ribbon and clicking the bullet button .

You might notice that if you have your cursor in a list, you only see li (list item) styles in the window pane, but not the broader ol (ordered list) and ul (unordered list) styles. To see these other styles, click at the very beginning of a list item. Then press the left arrow key. This should switch the Style window pane from showing li styles to the ol and ul styles. If you have your structure bars on, you'll see why this happens. When you initially click in a list, the li block bar is highlighted, so Flare assumes you want to do something with that style level. After you press your left arrow key enough, the next level up (ol or ul) becomes highlighted. And if you keep pressing the left arrow key, Flare highlights the next level of style (e.g., body). Whatever is highlighted in the structure bar should become available as styles in the Style window pane.

Example — Paragraph and Character Styles

You've selected multiple paragraphs, or your cursor is simply placed somewhere within a paragraph. In that case, only block-level styles (such as paragraph styles) are shown in the Styles window pane.

But if you select only a portion of a paragraph, only character styles are shown in the Styles window pane. So if you expect to be able to choose a block-level style, such as a paragraph style, you can't; because only a portion of the paragraph is selected, Flare thinks you want to choose a character-level style.

If you still do not see your style available for selection, try closing and re-launching Flare.