Character Stylesheets
Character Stylesheets enable you to apply formatting to your published data on an Element-by-Element basis.
Here's an example:
We're producing a catalog which includes a paragraph of text like this:
Price each: 12.99; per carton: 99.00. Contact us for bulk discount prices.
We want to format some parts of this paragraph differently - maybe like this:
Price each: 12.99; per carton: 99.00. Contact us for bulk discount prices.
We have 3 different styles in this paragraph:
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The basic paragraph style (plain)
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The "price" text style (bold)
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The bulk discount text style (italic)
How to include mixed formatting within a paragraph
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Create a Paragraph Stylesheet for the whole paragraph, if you don't already have one/
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Create a Character Stylesheet for the bold text.
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Create a Character Stylesheet for the italic text
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Apply the Paragraph Stylesheet to the whole Paragraph
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Apply the Character Stylesheet to the Elements that you want styled differently.
How Character Styles relate to your publishing destination
When you publish your data from CatBase, the published file includes tags that tell the publishing destination what formatting to apply to which text. If you've included any Character Styles, these will be mapped to existing Character Styles of the same name in your document template. If there are no matching styles, they will be created using the style information included in your published data.
Creating a new Character Style
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Go to the Publishing tab.
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Expand the Character Styles topic on the left of the window.
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Click New Character Style
The only mandatory information is the Style Name. You don't have to select any style attributes, as these will be managed by the corresponding Style sheet in your published document.
However, if you want to use the Preview feature, you may want to select the font, size, etc. here so that your previews appear as accurate as possible.
Style Name
Enter a name for his Character Style. If you are matching the style to an existing style in your document template, it must be spelled EXACTLY the same, and is case-sensitive. The Style Name is mandatory.
This project Only/All Projects
If you have more than one Database Project in your CatBase database, you can choose whether to keep each stylesheet "private" (belonging only to the current Project) or "public" (belonging to all your Database Projects).
Font
Select the font you want to use for this style.
Colour
Optionally choose a color.
Size
Enter the font size.
Scaling, Tracking, Baseline Shift, Shade, Skew, etc.
The relevance of these options depends upon the publishing destination. If they are not familiar to you, best to leave them alone!
Attributes
You can select one or more tributes such as Bold, Italic, etc. Not all Attributes are supported by all Publishing Destinations.
Using a Character Style
Character Styles can be applied in the following places:
In an Element
To choose a Character Style for any Element:
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Open the Element.
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Go to the Preferences tab.
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In the Data formatting area, click on the popup list next to Character Style and select the Character Style you want to apply to that Element. You can create new Character Styles "on the fly" by choosing Create a new Character Style (at the bottom of the list).
In a Rule
There is a Style change option in Rules:
To choose a Character Style, click on the Style Change popup and select Style for Element:. A list of Character Styles will then appear, from which you can choose the Character Style to apply to that Rule Element. For example, if a product is on special offer, we want to set the price in a Character Style called "red price". We would create a Rule like this:
