Customizing Colors and Styles for Rendering Profiling in Author Mode

By applying profiling colors and styles, you can customize the Author mode editing area to mark profiled content so you can instantly spot differences between multiple variants of the output. This allows you to preview the content that will go into the published output. The excluded text is grayed-out or hidden in Author mode, allowing you to easily recognize the differences.

Example: Profiling Colors and Styles

Choosing the right style for a specific profiling attribute is a matter of personal taste, but be aware of the following:

  • If the same block of text is profiled with two or more profiling attributes, their associated styles combine. Depending on the styling, this might result in an excessively styled content that may prove difficult to read or work with.
  • It is recommended that you only profile the differences. There is no need to profile common content, since excessive profiling can visually pollute the document.
  • A mnemonic associated with a style will help you instantly spot differences in the types of content.

Styling Profiling Attribute Values

To set colors and styles for profiling attribute values, follow these steps:

  1. Enable the Show Profiling Colors and Styles option from the Profiling / Conditional Text toolbar drop-down menu.
  2. Go to Profiling Settings from the Profiling / Conditional Text toolbar drop-down menu. This is a shortcut to the Profiling/Conditional Text options page. Select the Colors and Styles options page.
  3. Configure the styling for your profiling attribute values.

Result: The styling is now applied in the Author editing mode, the Outline view, and in the DITA Maps Manager view (if you are working with DITA documents). Also, to help you more easily identify the profiling you want to apply in the current context, the styling is applied in the Edit Profiling Attributes dialog box and in the inline form control pop up that allows you to quickly set the profiling attributes.

Profiling Attribute Value Form Control Pop Up

Alternate Method for DITA: If you are using a DITAVAL filter file to control the filtering of profiled content in DITA topics, you can use a flag filter to define the colors and styles that will be used when rendering the profiling. For detailed information about this alternate method, see the procedure in the Styling the Rendering of Profiled Content Using a DITAVAL File topic.

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