Writing Help Topics / Dynamic Styles /

Style Types

HelpSmith allows you to create and use styles of the following types:

Text styles

Text styles store font settings (e.g. Font, Size, Color, Bold, Underline, etc.), and also Language settings, which are applied to the text associated with this style.

Paragraph styles

Paragraph styles store paragraph related settings (e.g. Indentation, Alignment, Line Spacing, etc.), and also font and language settings, which are applied to the paragraphs associated with this style. Similarly to a text style, a paragraph style (with font and language settings) can also be applied to a fragment of text within a paragraph.

List styles

List styles store the list type, bullet or numbering format, list marker's font, and other list-related settings.

Table styles

Table styles store formatting settings for different elements of a table, such as the Header row, Total row, Odd and Even Rows and Columns, etc. For each table element, you can set font, paragraph, borders, background, and other table-related settings.

Reserved Styles

A help project includes a reserved set of styles (e.g. Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Normal, etc.) which you can use to format content in your topics.

Usually, it is recommended to use Heading styles for titles, and the Normal style for the main text in a topic. Thus, you can not only format the content, but also structure the sections and sub-sections within a topic. In most cases, the Hyperlink and Active Hyperlink styles should be used for the hyperlinks in your topics. Also, you can use the Highlight style to indicate the names of menu commands and other UI elements in the texts of user instructions, etc.

Remark: Please note that you can modify a reserved style, but cannot delete it.

User-defined Styles

In addition to the reserved styles, you can add and apply your own styles, as explained here.

Remark: Please note that for a user-defined style, the User Style setting is enabled, which means that this style cannot be deleted by the word processor even if the style is not used by any content anymore.

Automatically Created Styles

The HelpSmith's word processor stores all formatting settings by using styles. If you change any formatting settings directly in the word processor, HelpSmith either creates a new style to store the newly applied settings, or finds and links an existing style that has the same formatting settings.

A new style can be added as an independent style, or it may use an existing reserved or user-defined style as the base style. This depends on the style which is associated with the content whose formatting settings you have changed.

Please note that for auto-created styles (which are created automatically by the word processor), the User Style setting is disabled, which means that this style can be automatically deleted when the style is not used by any content anymore.

Remark: By default, the Styles pane can hide the automatically created styles. To show all the styles, you can set the appropriate option in the program settings.