Preexisting styles can be edited by selecting them in the style selection box and clicking Edit Style, or you can create a new style by clicking New Style. For beginners, the easiest way to create a new style is to start with a CITE-compliant template (see Creating a CITE-Compliant Style).
The style editor
The style editor has six tabs: About, Cards, Section, Document, Styles, and Special.
About is relatively self-explanatory: it contains several text fields for the style name, author, copyright date, version, and description, as well as a checkbox to indicate to users whether the style is CITE-compliant. (Please only mark genuinely CITE-compliant styles as CITE-compliant; for details on what CITE-compliance entails, see Creating a CITE-Compliant Style.)
Cards (shown at right), Section, and Document contain various fields for pieces of text called "parse strings", which give Factsmith instructions on how to format the text. For an explanation of how these fields are used and what can go in them, see Style Parsing Methods. See also Null Logic to find out how to clean up the output by selectively excluding text based on the context. Document also contains page and margin settings (in inches).
Styles is used to define paragraph and character styles which are used in the parse strings. For details, see Paragraph Styles. It also contains two checkboxes for options regarding how Factsmith handles line breaks (see Style Parsing Methods, "Special Styling").
Special contains miscellaneous special options: date parser settings (see Style Parsing Methods, "Date Parsing"); settings for what numbering and paragraph styles to use in the table of contents; and parse strings for special styling options (see Style Parsing Methods, "Special Styling").
Advanced editor features
The four text-formatting buttons at the lower left of the window can speed up basic tasks. When you highlight text in one of the parse string fields and click a formatting button, the appropriate formatting codes are added around it.
Next to each parse string field is a dropdown box; if you click on it, a list of all the available Insert Tags for that field will drop down. If you click on one, it will be inserted at the cursor.
Troubleshooting
Styles can be tricky to get right; certain formatting codes require special usage, and some combinations of elements can lead to unexpected results. If you're having trouble, here are a few tips:
- If another style does something similar to what you want, look at its method; you may find out what you're doing wrong.
- Look up all the formatting codes you're using to see if you missed an important usage detail.
- Experiment with different ways of doing the same thing until you find one that works consistently for all the different export plugins. (File formats vary widely, and you can't guarantee that it will come out looking right in, say, HTML, unless you test it.)