Using the CTRL button to select multiple text segments in Design Editor

Question

Hi there,
This may be a fairly elementary question, however I'm very new to RoboHelp.
I'm currently building an online help text system, and when formatting my html files in Design Editor, I have to apply styles one at a time. I was hoping RoboHelp would have a function identical to Microsoft Word whereby holding down the CTRL key would allow you to select various segments in the file and apply the style. Eg. selecting only text you want to apply Heading 3 to.
If RoboHelp does not have this functionality, this project will take me in the vicinity of 7 years to complete. Thanks for your time.
Regards,
PK

Answer 1

No it doesn't work that way. What you need to do is create some character styles in your style sheet and apply those.
Paragraph styles are defined something like
P {
    font-size: 10pt;
    margin-top: 0pt;
    margin-bottom: 6pt;
    font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;
    color: #000000;
    font-weight: normal;
P.Normal-Indent {
    margin-left: 20pt;
where the second P definition will inherit all that is in P plus add the indent.
When you select those styles, they will be applied to the whole paragraph.
You can also create characters classes. If you do it within RoboHelp, RH will write the CSS code for you. If you edit the CSS outside RH, then instead of writing P or some other tag, you would normally start with the full stop so you might have
.code {
    font-size: xx-small;
    font-family: Courier;
to apply the Courier font to a selection in any paragraph style.
In RoboHelp you need to prefix the character code with "span" to make it display in the dropdown, thus you would need:
span.code {
    font-size: xx-small;
    font-family: Courier;
See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips