Autonumbering without Numbers

I recently finished release notes in Flare, but was frustrated—once again—because it’s not easy to bold a word at the beginning of a sentence in html.


I could create a span tag, which is better than an inline style. It just seems messy to me.

Then Laura Johnson wrote about Two Nifty Note Styles in Madcap Flare in her blog, A Flare for Help.

Her suggestion to use autonumbering in Flare’s style sheet worked like a charm!

For some reason, I associated autonumbering with, well, numbers. I use it for chapter headings to automatically insert “Chapter {n}: “ before the name of the chapter. I knew I could add text. I knew I could add html tags. But I never thought about using them to create a paragraph style with no numbers.

I just added the bold tags with the introductory word under the mc-auto-number-format property.

Now, I have a style that not only bolds the first word of the paragraph, it adds it. I’m saved keystrokes, too!

Thanks, Laura.