Dynamic Styles: Overview

What are dynamic styles?

Dynamic styles is a powerful tool which significantly simplifies the process of working with font, paragraph, and list settings. HelpSmith has a full-featured system of dynamic styles similar to the ones that you can meet in Microsoft(R) Word.

Depending on its type, a style can contain information about text font (for example, font name, size, color, highlight color, etc.), paragraph (text alignment, line spacing, etc.), or about a bulleted or numbered list (list type, etc.).

Why use styles?

Dynamic styles allow you to store all the formatting information separately from the document, which allows you to decide to make any changes at any time without the need to manually process lots of help topics.

Also, with support for dynamic styles, you do not have to apply the same attributes over and over while writing help topics. Simply select the part of text and then double-click the necessary style to set the required formatting to the selection.

Additionally, you can overwrite default style settings by defining alternative views for HTML Help, Web Help, or Printed Manuals, so the same topic may look differently depending on the output help format.

How do I work with styles in HelpSmith?

The main tool for working with styles in HelpSmith is the Styles and Formatting panel available via the menu command Formatting|Styles and Formatting. Depending on the program settings, the panel lists all the styles of your current help project or lists only the styles of selected types. Using the style toolbar (located above the style list), you can perform such operations as adding a new style, modifying the selected style, deleted one or more styles, and applying a style to the selected part of text in the text editor.