Table Stylesheets in Flare

I’ve gotten several emails recently asking about table style features in Flare 7 and 8. So this blog recaps the TableStyle Editor and two of its most useful but somewhat unfamiliar features.

When you create a table stylesheet, Flare takes you into the TableStyle Editor, shown below.

The General tab controls table-wide features like table margins, outer borders, cell padding, and so on. The remaining four tabs – Rows, Columns, Header, and Footer, have the same options. They let us set the formatting for different table elements, such as setting the colors and text attributes for alternate rows within the table, as shown above. Useful and simple. (I created the colors shown here for a class to be sure that attendees clearly saw the effect of different settings. I’d be unlikely to use such garish colors in a real project.) Straightforward…

At the top of the TableStyle Editor are two features that were added in Flare 7 and are in Flare 8 – Medium and Apply Style.

The Medium option extends the Medium feature to table styles. (Before 7, mediums were only available for regular CSSs.) A quick recap…

Mediums let us create a single CSS that contains alternate settings for alternate outputs. Say you’ve got a project to be output to WebHelp and PDF. You decide to use Verdana Red 16 pt for the WebHelp h1s and Verdana Black 16 pt for the PDF. You’d expect to create two CSSs in this case, one with the settings for the WebHelp and one for the PDF. If you later decided to add WebHelp Mobile as an output with h1s as Verdana Blue 12 pt., you’d have to add a third CSS. It’s simply, but maintenance gets cumbersome. Instead, you can create one CSS with specific settings for the default output, which you decide is WebHelp, and alternate settings for the PDF and mobile styles. You’re now using one CSS for all three outputs, which is easier to maintain. It’s a very useful feature if you single source. The addition of mediums to table stylesheets simply extends this flexibility.

The Apply Style feature automates several table tasks that are common even if you don’t single source. Clicking the Apply Style button displays the Apply Table Style dialog box, shown here

Prior to this feature appearing in Flare 7, applying a table stylesheet to tables was simple but tedious. You had to apply the stylesheet to each table individually. If some setting in the table stylesheet didn’t work, it was usually due to local formatting in the table, usually introduced when the original author tweaked the table by hand in Flare or Word to get it to look “right”. But local formatting overrides styles, so you had to remove the local formatting either by going into the code or by selecting Table > Reset Local Cell Formatting. Easy, but one table at a time.

The Apply Table Style feature eliminates much of the drudgery in table formatting. You select some or all of the topics in the project and simply tell Flare to apply the table stylesheet to all tables in those topics. You can also tell Flare to overwrite any existing styles in those tables, remove any print styles, and remove all local formatting.

So far, I’ve only found two cases where the Apply Table Style feature didn’t work, neither one being the fault of the feature itself.

The first is when a project has more than one type of table and thus more than one table stylesheet. In this case, Flare has no way of knowing what table stylesheets to apply to what tables. You have to apply the appropriate table stylesheets by hand. This seems like a fairly easy thing to fix by adding some sort of “type” indicator to the tables and then telling Flare to apply table stylesheet A to all tables of type A, table stylesheet B to all tables of type B, and so on. I *think* this has been added as a feature request for a later release.

The second is when importing tables from Word where the author used the first row to hold the column heads. When you import those tables into Flare and apply a table stylesheet, the Flare Header row styles don’t seem to work. The reason is that the original table uses the first row, usually, as a header row but it’s just an ordinary row. It’s not programmatically designated as a header row. So Flare doesn’t know to apply its programmatic Header row style to that row. Fixing this is tedious but simple… select the table, open the Table Properties dialog box, change the number of Header rows from 0 to 1, select the column heads in the table, move them into the “real” Flare Header row, at which point they instantly use the Header row styles, and delete the now empty “header row” from the table.

The only other instance that I can think of where this feature might not work is when dealing with very old Word documents that contain tables that had been hand-tweaked for years. The “reset local cell formatting” feature may have some limit as to the junk code it can deal with but I haven’t found it yet.

All in all, two nicely done features that add a degree of automation to a mundane task in help authoring.