Quote:
Originally Posted by Gregg Bell
And it's really cool. Basically I just do in the styles what I was doing on the tool bar. (I took your suggestion of getting rid of the toolbar.) One question (I'm sure I'll have more when I study this further): doing italics in styles. I went to make a new style for italics (I named it "italics"), but then, since I wanted to keep the italics for the html, I didn't delete the style "Italics" (because that would've deleted the italics), so I kept the style "italics' in there. But in the html this is what showed up: (I was italicizing Encyclopedia)
<span class=italics>Encyclopedia </span>
I reopened the tool bar and did an italics version that way and in the html it was the familiar <i>Encyclopedia</i>.
It seems italics is the only thing I would need, so is there a way to do italics in styles?
And lastly I'm giving you an apple for being such a great teacher! Thanks!
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By italics I presume you mean emphasis of one or more words within a paragraph (character type styles rather than paragraph type styles). Yes such emphasis is generally represented by italicised text in novels but I make the distinction because it is generally better that a style is named for the purpose (which presumably will not change), rather than the formatting used, which could change.
The distinction can be important. For example I may have emphasis in the dialogue in the main text, but I may also have - for example - a bibliography at the end that uses variously formatted text. If my emphasis style is named "italics" and today I choose to format parts of my bibliography as italics, then I may make the mistake of using the "italics" style. And now, suddenly and presumably accidentally, I have tied the formatting of my bibliography to the formatting of my main text. If I want to change one without changing the other I would have to go back and change the styles of all the relevant words. I can avoid such accidents by naming my styles by purpose. A style of "Emphasis" means I one thing, "BiblioBookTitle" means something else.
And yes, the result is that your html looks like:
Main text: I will <span class="Emphasis">not</span> do that.
Bibliography: Smith, A, B. <span class="BiblioBookTitle">Words of Wisdom</span>, pages 325-329.
This is normal and expected. Both styles exist within your CSS and can be adjusted if needed - and because they are clearly named you know specifically what you are changing. Obviously "<span class="Emphasis">" is much longer and uglier than "<i>", but the reader is never supposed to see the raw HTML. Yes, HTML and XML can be horribly verbose languages and do increase the file size significantly, but this is also normal and expected. (And anyway, we only use emphasis carefully and deliberately - don't we?
- so there is not going to be that many of them.)
PS. Thanks for the apple.
