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). Some presentation effects, notably interactive Web presentation effects (such as combo boxes and JavaScript event handlers), will by their nature not be available in paged media output (RTF, PDF and Word 2007+). In these cases, the paged media will use a suitable print rendition of the effect. For print output, however, StyleVision offers essential page definition options. These paged media options, such as page size, page layout, and headers and footers, are defined additionally to the styling of components, and will be used for RTF, PDF and Word 2007+ output alone.
| Note: | Since plain text cannot be formatted, text styling properties and page layouts in the design will be ignored when generating Text output. |
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. Note that the inherent styles of predefined formats are converted to equivalent markup for RTF, PDF and Word 2007+ output.
| Note: | When defining CSS styles for an SPS component be aware that some styles may not, by their nature, be applicable to paged media output (RTF, PDF and Word 2007+). Also, when HTML selectors are used (in external stylesheets and global style rules), these will not be applicable to paged media output (RTF, PDF and Word 2007+). When such selectors are used, a comment is displayed next to the selector to the effect that the style will not be applied to Text, RTF, PDF and Word 2007+ output. |
Designing for paged media output
For StyleVision's paged media support (RTF, PDF and Word 2007+ outputs and XSLT stylesheets for RTF, PDF and Word 2007+), page definition and layout options are available. These options are used additionally to the component styling mechanism, and are described in the Designing Print Output sub-section of this section.