First impression PPv3

[Tim Frost]

Minor PP3 niggles:

1. In the help, the examples for "atocs" show "atoc".

2. Entering our own HREF_HELPURL in the toolbox, I accidentally left off the final '/'. It would have been nice if I had been allowed just to fix it, instead of your putting back the it-authoring address and forcing me to retype the whole string!

3. I am sure there used to be an image of each skin to help me avoid the garish colours when picking a new one! Is there a gallery of all the new skins yet?

4. What seems to be a valid URL entered as HEADERLOGO_URL in the toolbox is rejected saying that http:// is missing (but it is present).

More seriously, in my first test of a V3 responsive skin, the vertical paragraph spacing is badly broken. Our 'normal' style, and some but not all others, seems to have lost its 'spacebefore' attribute, so the result is solid blocks of multiple paragraphs. I am trying the minimalist-blue skin almost out of the box, and I have not yet made any change to the project itself. What might I have missed?

Apart from this, it all looks like a big step forward!

[Tim Green]

Hi Tim,

Thanks a lot for your comments.

Help glitch: will be corrected, thanks.

Fixing errors in entries: That's a bit more difficult, but long term I want to change it.

Previews: These aren't shown when selecting skins in the toolbox, but they are when you select them in Help & Manual. Also on my ToDo list.

Header logo URL: There's an error in the value check for this. You can fix it for now by deleting the check in the XML file. Open ppskinconfig7.xml from the Help & Manual program folder in an editor. In the pp37_responsive skin group, locate <variable id="HEADERLOGO_URL" and just delete the valuecheck="xxx" attribute. It will then no longer have a value check and you can enter anything you like.

Vertical spacing: I can't reproduce this at all. My guess is that you haven't updated Help & Manual and that your output is still generating a CSS file with an invalid name for the new skins. Update to 7.0.8 and that will fix it.

[Tim Green]

Hi Tim:

Update on the URL check: The check doesn't actually contain an error, it's just insisting that you enter a file name. If you include your index.html or whatever at the end, it will be accepted. I'm going to add a new check for this that will accept the URL both with and without a file name.

[Tim Frost]

I had already updated to 7.0.8 and generated the help from the PP3 skin into a fresh output folder. I have had another look at this. It seems that only the 'normal' style is affected, but images in the text also have no space above. And normal style paragraphs are vertically spaced correctly if they have a bullet. But when there is a mix of paragraph styles and headings which have different spacings it is a little hard to check exactly which ones are wrong. As I said, I have made no changes to the main project yet.

I will probably copy the whole project to a new folder before I start adjusting screen shots and tables, and I don't have time to maintain two editions at the moment, so I will not need the override for the variable validations immediately!

[Tim Green]

Hi Tim,

It would be helpful if you could mail me a small demo project with which I can reproduce the issue with the paragraph spacing at support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @) , because this isn't something I can reproduce anywhere at the moment.

[Tim Green]

Hi Tim,

Update: I've located and fixed the problem with the spacing for Normal styles. An update will be posted soon -- I'll add a message here when it's online.

It was an issue that I missed because all the test projects I was using were optimally styled with no direct use of the Normal style. All of them used a named BodyText style for basic paragraphs instead. The problem was simple, but far-reaching: Since the main pages are now frameless, all the styles apply to the entire page. There is no separation between the layout portion and the topic content portion. In the main layout CSS files, all the standard HTML elements, including the <p> paragraph element, are reset to zero padding and margins to eliminate deviations caused by different browser defaults for different elements.

For historical reasons, Help & Manual uses a plain <p> tag without any style class at all for the Normal style. As a result, resetting the <p> tag to zero padding and margin eliminates the spacing for Normal, if you set it there. I've fixed this by removing the reset for the standard <p> tag from the main pages and adding explicit padding and margin values to all the paragraphs present in the layout portion of the page.

Generally, however, I would still recommend not using Normal as your base style anywhere in your projects. It should only be used as the means for defining the base font for the entire project, and should never have any spacing or other paragraph attributes applied to it. Instead, it is best to create explicitly named styles like BodyText. Then you never run the risk of having the settings of the global, unnamed <p> style causing unexpected results elsewhere in your pages.

[Tim Frost]

Is there any easy way to get from where I am now to where you suggest? Currently Normal is defined as "Standard style, used as default for topic text +Arial, Size 10pt, Color, LeftIndent, FirstIndent, RightIndent, SpaceBefore, Alignment". In this list, Left, Right and First indents are all zero and alignment is Left, but SpaceBefore is 14 pixels for Normal.

We have about three dozen styles based on Normal and another dozen based on those, the majority of which (but not all) inherit the SpaceBefore from Normal. I would be happy to change Normal paragraphs to a new BodyText if this could be done in one operation, but not if it means editing all the others. Obviously resetting Normal to the default would not be a good idea without a bit of forward planning!

[Tim Green]

Hi Tim,

The update is now online, so if you download and install again now you will get the slipfix version that no longer has the spacing problem with Normal.

There's a simple trick you can use to get a style to inherit Normal's attributes and then reset Normal: In the Edit Fonts dialog, select the font you want to use as Body Text and change its "Based On" setting from "Normal" to "None". This will create an independent style that takes all the current attributes of Normal with it. Then reset Normal, and then change the Based On setting of the independent Body Text style back to Normal. It will bring back its explicit settings, which it will then keep.

Of course, you need to make all the styles you want to change in this way independent before resetting Normal. I'd recommend making a backup of your project before playing with this, just in case Murphy also takes part in the activities...