Styles in Fast-Help are similar to Styles in MS Word with one difference - instead of having one style that applies to both text and paragraph formatting, Fast-Help separates them into Text and Paragraph styles. Select "Format | Style Gallery" to display the following screen:-

On the left is a list of all Styles. The symbol refers to Text Styles and the symbol refers to Paragraph Styles. You may notice that there is a Text and a Paragraph style with a red asterisk. These are the default Styles. They cannot be deleted, but they can be modified.

Text Styles

A Text Style limits itself to a block of text whereas a Paragraph Style can apply to a whole Paragraph. In the screen shot above the "Normal" Text Style is selected. You can see that you have options to change Font, Size and Character set, as well as font color and the background color. You can also apply formatting such as Bold, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough, Overstrike, All Uppercase, Subscript and Superscript. All of these formatting options will be faithfully reproduced in Html but WinHelp only supports Bold, Italic and Underline.

On the right there is a box called "Code". The default option is "None". Choosing "Html" means that all text formatted with this Style will be treated literally in Html. For example, with this Style you could type in text like:-

  <b>I am bold</b>

and when you compile it would appear as "I am bold". If you select "Rtf" then you can type in rtf codes such as

  {\b I am bold}

and they will appear as "I am bold" when compiled in WinHelp.

To add a new Text Style, click the Add Text Style icon on the right of the Style name at the top of the screen.

Paragraph Styles

When you click on a Paragraph Style on the Left you will see three tabs appear on the right, "Layout", "Border" and "Background". The "Layout" tab looks like this:-

The alignment buttons give you Left, Center, Right and Justify options. Justify is not supported by WinHelp. Below that you have the spacing options. The "Before" and "After" fields refer to the space before and after the Paragraph. The Line spacing can be set to Single, 1.5 Lines or Double. On the right you can control the Indents.

Clicking on the Border tab will display the following:-

In the Settings box, the first field controls the border color and the next field controls how thick the border looks. The "Space between borders" field is useful to widen the gap between double or triple borders.

The "Border Sides" allow you to control which sides have borders, all, or some or none.

The "Spacing between Border and Paragraph" allow precise control over the spacing between each border side and the paragraph text.

The "Border Type" allows you to set None, Single, Double, Triple, Thick Inside or Thick Outside borders.

If you click on the "Background" tab you will see the following screen:-

You can set the background color by clicking on a color on the left and to create a color padding around the edge of your paragraph set the options on the right.

To add a new Paragraph Style, click the Add Paragraph Style icon on the right of the Style name at the top of the screen.

Cascading Style Changes

Click [OK] to save your settings. If you have made any changes you will be asked if you want to cascade your style changes to the rest of your Project. This may take some time, as each page has to be opened to apply the new changes. You can also optionally choose to backup your project. If you choose this, your Project's ".mdb" file will be backed up with today's date, in your Project's "Backups" folder.

You can also optionally choose to create a restore point for every page. This will allow you to individually go back to any page's previously saved state, prior to these changes.