Presentation and Output
In the SPS design, a single set of styling features is defined for components. These styles are converted to the corresponding style markup in the respective outputs (Authentic View, HTML, RTF, PDF, Word 2007+ and Text in the Enterprise Edition; Authentic View, HTML, RTF, and Text in the Professional Edition; HTML in the Basic Edition).
| Note: | Printed-page based output formats, such as RTF, PDF, Word 2007+ and Text (as opposed to HTML), are not supported in the Basic Edition of StyleVision. As a result, all features relating to such output (such as adding page headers and footers) are disabled in the Basic Edition. To be able to use these features, you must obtain a license for the Professional Edition (includes RTF and Text output) or Enterprise Edition (includes RTF, PDF, Word 2007+ and Text). Please see the StyleVision edition comparison page on the Altova website for more information. |
Styling of SPS components
All styling of SPS components is done using CSS2 principles and syntax. Styles can be defined in external stylesheets, globally for the SPS, and locally on a component. The cascading order of CSS2 applies to the SPS, and provides considerable flexibility in designing styles. How to work with CSS styles is described in detail in the Working with CSS Styles sub-section of this section.
The values of style properties can be entered directly in the Styles or Properties sidebars, or they can be set via XPath expressions. The benefits of using XPath expressions are: (i) that the property value can taken from an XML file, and (ii) that a property value can be assigned conditionally according to a test contained in the XPath expression.
Additionally, in the SPS design, certain HTML elements are available as markup for SPS components. These predefined formats are passed to the HTML output. The formatting inherent in such markup is therefore also used to provide styling to SPS components. When CSS styles are applied to predefined formats, the CSS styles get priority over the inherent style of the predefined format. Predefined formats are described in the Predefined Formats sub-section of this section.