Issue With Bullet Sizes When Snippets Used In A List

[John R.]

Hi,

I'm using H+M 7.0.6 Build 3732 on Win7/32.

The basic problem is that bullet sizes are not as expected in the H+M editor when:

1. The bulletted list follows a line of text that is formatted as Heading3. (In my case Heading3 is Arial, 16pt and Normal text is Arial, 10pt.)

2. One or more of the buleitted list items contains a snippet that also has portions of its Normal text formatted as bold+italic or as a super/subscript.(Note: The bold+italic formatting is applied using a Text Style, while the super- / sub-scripts are applied directly.)

Additional Observations:

1. When ALL of the snippets in the bulletted list contain only "Normal" text the bullet sizes are as expected.

2. When one or more of the snippets contains some text formatting (whether via a style or directly) the bullets are too large.

3. In 2 above the Style, Font and Font Size of the linked snippet in the list are reported as Normal+, Symbol and 16pt, respectively.

My guess is that the above situation is an undocumented feature (bug) in H+M, but I may well be wrong.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

TIA.

Regards,

John R.

[Tim Green]

Hi John,

1. The bulletted list follows a line of text that is formatted as Heading3. (In my case Heading3 is Arial, 16pt and Normal text is Arial, 10pt.)

This can only happen if you just press ENTER after typing your heading and the heading style is not configured to automatically apply a different style to the next paragraph automatically. Then the first list item will also be styled with the heading style and as a result all the list items will adopt that formatting. In lists, the formatting of the first item in the list controls the formatting of the entire list. Also, the formatting of the LAST character in the FIRST item in the list controls the text formatting of the bullets. So if you add a space to the end of the first item and format it with bold or a color that will be applied to the bullets or the numbering.

2. One or more of the buleitted list items contains a snippet that also has portions of its Normal text formatted as bold+italic or as a super/subscript.(Note: The bold+italic formatting is applied using a Text Style, while the super- / sub-scripts are applied directly.)

You probably forgot to uncheck the option "Snippet begins a new paragraph" when inserting the snippet. If you insert a full paragraph snippet in the middle of a list you will split the list and create a new list, and that will probably have unexpected results.

If you continue to have problems, please mail a small demo project to support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @) and I will check it for you.

[John R.]

Tim,

1. You are correct that the style following the Heading3 style was not set to Normal. It now is and there's no change in behaviour.

2. Unchecking the "Snippet begins new paragraph" causes the linked in snippet to be truncated to the first 34 characters of the snippet.

It will take me some time, a day or two, to strip down my help project and organize it so that it can be easily viewed on a computer with a different setup.

If you have space a drive D: to which you could copy the sample project it would make it a lot easier for me because I not all of the directory settings may not be relative.

When I have the simplified version I'll send it to you as an email attachment.

Regards,
John

[Tim Green]

Hi John,

I've now received the project and as I expected the problem was caused by the formatting of the header having been transferred to the list, compounded by the fact that the snippets in the list obscured the formatting. You also need to change the snippets to turn off the "snippet begins a new paragraph" option.

You did set part of the paragraph to Normal, but not the important part -- my guess is that you just clicked in the paragraph to reset it, instead of selecting the entire list. If you select the entire list and apply the style that will solve the problem.

This is a lot easier to see if you turn on the display of paragraph marks in the editor, in View > Program Options > Editor. Then you can see that the paragraph mark is formatted with the same large bold font as the header and everything is immediately clear. I strongly recommend leaving paragraph marks on permanently. It makes it much easier to avoid all kinds of simple errors that are otherwise much harder to see.

[John R.]

Hi Tim,

THANK YOU!

What I had missed was selecting all of the list items and then applying the style.

I also observed that in some cases the bullet sizes are still not correctly displayed in the H+M editor; however, the published help (chm) has the correct bullet sizes.

Thanks again,

Regards,
John