Rise: Multiple Font Styles Within a Text Block

Sep 11, 2018

Consider this a feature request. I would like the ability to specify multiple fonts or styles within a single text block. Frequently, when writing technical training materials, I need to reference information that has to be used precisely. For example:

"When a request to the backup system takes a long time to load, a record is written to the slow_load_time table in the troubleshooting database."

I want to make "slow_load_time" and "troubleshooting" use a different font to highlight that this is a precise name of a system on a computer system. By allowing me to use a monospace font like Courier New, the technical nature of that particular piece of text is emphasized. This lets me communicate in a subtle way to the learner the nature of that particular piece of text better than the block's variable width font with bolding and italics does.

22 Replies
Crystal Horn

Thanks, Ian and Joshua! I'm not sure if this will get you closer, but you can adjust the background color of your inline text. I used a gray background here to call out my code:

For other folks, as well, you can also use the code snippet block in the multimedia blocks library for code that will use the entire line.

We'll keep you posted on any other updates!

Ivan Belash

Hello,

Workaround with bold/italic font substitution is not working for me because I use both for their intended purpose. And I already tried playing with background color - it does not provide significant difference with the main text.

Please introduce monospaced formatting. I suggest using the "Consolas" and/or "JetBrains Mono" fonts on top of the Courier font family. Aforementioned fonts provide much better difference between "1l|" and "O0o" characters.

1l| O0o
Tony Kay

Yes this would be a huge feature. Many of our courses/content developers cannot be moved to use Rise in its current form. We use constant references to code inline and the code block whilst useful does not work well for examples like:

Use the ansible command to test connectivity. 

Real world simple example Inline example

Also a more powerful snippet block would be nice with a colorizer, optional line numbers etc so we can make code more readable and reference lines by number.

colorizer

Tim St. Clair

If you happen to know how to use the Web Inspector panel to edit the underlying HTML of pages, you might be interested to find out that you can edit the HTML of most blocks, and it will persist. So you could add <span style="font-family:monospace">the text</span> around some words to switch it to a monospace font. You can also use this trick to remove the annoying grey border on tables by adding ' style="border:none" ' on each cell. This is a pretty terrible authoring experience, but it does work, and since it's been 5 years since this thread was opened and Articulate hasn't added the feature, it's probably the only option.

Ian Janes

Hi Phil,

This had been my experience too. But another comment of yours, wherein you recorded a video showing how to use this technique for alpha lists, you mentioned that sometimes you need to make one more small edit to get these changes to stick. I realized I'd not tried that here. I just did (making my inline edits, then deleting and re-typing the period after "workplace"), and Tim's suggestion appears to work for me now:

Hitting Preview does strip out the !important declaration, but it doesn't seem to matter. 

Also, along the way I checked whether Froala has an inline code option, and they do (that's where I got class="fr-class-code" from, although interestingly that didn't affect the font). Which just makes Articulate's position here even more infuriating... It's not like the alpha list thing where Froala requires you to edit the HTML yourself.

(So help me God if someone from Articulate comes to this thread to thank any of us for the workaround, by the way. Articulate should be embarrassed that this is the state of their product and usability, there is absolutely nothing to celebrate here.)