Freeway goes really far toward mapping the language and gestures of Desktop Publishing onto Web design. This can fail you when there are no words in DTP for what you can easily express in HTML.
In HTML, a span is a tag – a container element – similar to a P (paragraph) or a DIV (HTML box in Freeway-speak). There are dozens of different tags in HTML, and each of them has a specific and often unique purpose.
When you see a list on screen, what you are seeing is a structured collection of tags. The outer UL tag (unordered list) contains any number of LI (list item) tags, and within those LI tags are the content of the list. The bullets and their color are created not by styling the content of the LI tags, but by the intersection of the UL and LI. That same LI could appear within an OL (ordered list) and when it does, the markers of the list will be numbers. Changing one letter in the parent tag name makes that entire change.
In DTP, you would type the • bullet character into your text, and then changing that to a numbered list, you would change each marker from • to 3. or whatever you needed. The bullets or other markers are a part of the text, so you style them inline the same way you would style any other text visible on screen. And here the perfect mapping between DTP and HTML is broken and you can easily lose your way.
So the color of the bullets cannot come from within the LI, it has to come from without. The easiest way to alter the color of the text and the bullets together is to create a paragraph style, as Ernie suggested, that combines the list styling and the color you need. Once you make that style and apply it to multiple paragraphs of text, those paragraphs will be wrapped up in a list where all of the color appears continuous.
When you select a few words in Freeway and change the color of that text, or make it larger for emphasis or change the font, you are most likely creating a span tag around those words, within the context of your outer paragraph or other container tag. Here’s what that looks like in HTML:
<p>
This is some text and <span class="bigRed">some other text</span> here.
</p>
The words ‘some other text’ might be big and red at this point, if you haven’t changed your mind about the styling choice in the interim. More often than not, the actual style name will be style125 or something equally opaque, made up on the fly by Freeway in response to your ad-hoc styling in the Text Inspector.
If you create a list by first applying the list formatting with the Text Inspector, and then later change the color of that text by highlighting it and changing the color (also in the Inspector), then the very best you can hope for is something like this:
<ul>
<li><span class="style345">A list item here</span></li>
<li><span class="style345">A list item here</span></li>
<li><span class="style345">A list item here</span></li>
<li><span class="style345">A list item here</span></li>
</ul>
The words will be whatever color is declared in style345, but the bullets will be whatever the default text color is for the entire page.
But once you move the color style out to the UL, you will get what you need, which is this:
<ul class="myGreenList">
<li>A list item here</li>
<li>A list item here</li>
<li>A list item here</li>
<li>A list item here</li>
</ul>
Not only is this much more concise code – more readable and understandable and containing fewer copy-and-paste bits of styling information – it will look the way you want it to.
Walter
On Sep 23, 2013, at 3:32 AM, Ernie Simpson wrote:
I’m saying it IS a simple matter in FWP… that it wasn’t so for you is
likely due to user experience. Glad that it is all sorted now, but hope
next time will be more straight-forward for you.
There likely won’t be mention of “span styles” in the documentation - there
likely won’t be mention of a lot of terms we use on the forum. Softpress
uses fantasy language to protect you from the horrors of using real-world
terms. This leads to confusion when you brush against the real world of web
design… there is no kerning, leading, space before (or after).
As I said before, a span is a style Freeway applies only to selections and
can be recognized in the Styles palette as lacking the paragraph symbol ¶
next to it. It is called a span style because the code it writes uses the
tag.
Best,
–
Ernie Simpson
On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 2:49 AM, Rgator email@hidden wrote:
I have looked through the PDF reference for Freeway and I am not able to
find anything about “span styles”. I wasn’t trying to do anything unusual,
just some straight up text with some bullet points and I found it
impossible to keep normal paragraphs together with the bullets points if I
wanted the bullet points to be the same color as the text.
Then the three separate text blocks of bullet points took many, many
attempts before they all came out. Crazy difficult. Do the same thing three
times in a row and get different results each time. You would think this
would be a simple matter in Freeway.
Thanks,
Robert
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