Styles – Why use them?

In Doc-To-Help, you apply Styles to your Source documents so that your Target output will look and behave the way you prefer.

That's one good reason to use them, but not the only one.

Another very good reason is because Styles enforce consistency. If you create a Style for highlighting items in your user interface (for examples, toolbar buttons, dialog box names, windows, etc.) and that style uses a specific font, font color, and it's bold – you can name it "UI Element" and you and everyone on your team can use it. OR you could write up a post-it note to remind yourself that UI Elements are Verdana dark blue bold. And then send everyone on your team an email that lets them know this is the standard (or note it in your Style Guide).

But when you apply local formatting (AKA "in line" or "ad hoc" formatting) without using a Style, you don't have a standard. You simply have a guideline. And it is easy to forget guidelines.

In addition, if you had created a Style in the first place, you could easily change what "UI Element" looks like by updating the Style. If you want to switch from dark blue to green, you simply update the Style. You don't have to comb through all of your source documents and fix each UI Element individually.

That being said, you can choose *not* to use Styles ... in that case you can use the Formatting buttons in all three of the editors in Doc-To-Help. If you are using Word, most of them can be found in the Formatting toolbar (Word 2003) or the Font and Paragraph ribbon groups in the Home tab (Word 2007). In Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage, you will use the Formatting toolbar (FrontPage) or the Text menu (Dreamweaver).

In the Doc-To-Help XHTML editor, you will use the Formatting ribbon group on the Editor tab.

In the XHTML Editor, there is a slight difference between the buttons to the left of the Local Formatting button, and those to the right, however. The ones available to the left of the Local Formatting button (bullets, numbering, bold, italic, subscript, superscript, and more) may be applied to your document and the document will still conform to the W3C XHTML 1.0 Strict Specification. This is because those options are part of that specification. If you click the Local Formatting button, additional options for applying formatting without styles will be revealed. These options are: font name, font size, text align left, text align center, text align right, text align justify, highlight color, font color, underline and strikethrough. If you use these options, your document will no longer conform to the W3C XHTML 1.0 Strict specification; it will switch to the Transitional specification.

Just a note before using the Local Formatting button …. If you use Local Formatting options (font name, font size, text align left, text align center, text align right, text align justify, highlight color, font color, underline and strikethrough) then turn off Local Formatting by clicking the button, all of the formatting applied with the local formatting options will be removed, returning the document to the Strict specification.

Long story short (well, maybe it is too late for that) – using Styles are an important "best practice" when working on a Doc-To-Help project. But Doc-To-Help still lets you use Local (ad hoc, in line) Formatting in any editor if you would like. Because we want you to have options, and work the way you want to. J