![]() Flare then enables you to select multiple folders and topics (see screenshot below), and automatically applies the current Table Style to all the tables within the selected items. You can do this quickly and easily by clicking the Apply button at the top of the TableStyle Editor. Apply a table style to multiple topicsĪfter creating a table style, you may sometimes need to apply the new style to tables in multiple topics, or even to all the tables throughout your project. For these effects, you should make use of Flare's support for the floating and absolute positioning of elements in a topic (see bit.ly/1O6ZWHm). ![]() But before I go any further, I should mention that tables are not recommended as a way of achieving special layout effects in Flare, such as placing a section of text alongside an image. In the rest of this article, I'll provide some tips that I have found useful when working on tables within Flare. Flare takes care of all the complex HTML coding for you. You can create a separate table style for each of the different table formats that you need, and then easily apply the appropriate table style to each table from the right-click context menu (see the screenshot below). This editor makes it easy to design the overall format of a table without needing to be aware of all of the individual HTML elements, and it provides a useful preview of the resulting appearance as shown in this screenshot. These are actually perfectly standard CSS files but they contain only the HTML elements for tables, and have their own special TableStyle Editor within the Flare user interface. ![]() Instead of dealing with all the elements of a table within your project's main style sheet, Flare separates these off into dedicated style sheets called "table styles". I described this approach in a conference presentation on creating table styles in CSS. In theory, you could do this by creating named classes for each of the different elements of a table ( table, col, thead, etc.) and then applying the appropriate class name to each of the table elements individually - but this would be painstaking work.Ī more efficient alternative is to apply a class to the top-level table element only, and then use Descendant Selectors (one of my favourite features of CSS) to set the formatting for all the other elements that are nested within it. This creates a challenge when trying to set up specific table "styles" to ensure consistency in format between tables of the same type. The challenges of tables in HTMLĪ single table is often comprised of as many as eight different HTML elements such as table, col, thead, tr, th and td. But tables are also often a great alternative to lists or freeform text because they provide ways of avoiding repeated phrases, highlighting key information, making patterns more obvious, and enabling comparisons. They have an obvious role in presenting large quantities of structured data such as specifications or command references. Tables represent an invaluable item in any technical communicator's toolset.
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