MadCap Flare Style ID menu enlarged and not working

Question

I'm fairly new to using Madcap Flare but have been using it without problems for a few months. Now suddenly the Style Class menu appears zoomed way out to many times its normal size, and it won't scroll or let me select a style. The steps to reproduce the problem:

1. Open an .htm topic in MadCap Flare 12.
2. In the XML Editor view, right-click on a P tag.
3. From the pop up menu, select Style Class > and wait.

After a few seconds, the style class menu pops up on the left but it's covering three-quarters of the screen from left to right, and covering the entire screen from top to bottom. The style items in the menu are so huge that only four of them are visible. I can't scroll through them nor select one.

Until recently the menu acted normally, popping up in a much smaller size and letting me scroll through it and select styles.

I haven't found any mention of this in my searches online.

Edit: Adding a few more pieces of info:

• Resetting MadCap Flare layouts doesn't help.
• This only happens on paragraph tags, I notice. If I right click on a li or h2 or any other kind, the style class menu acts normally.

Answer 1

This seems to have been just a matter of the WYSIWIG popup styles menu expanding to display the one heading that the previous writer had set up to a large font size. In displaying the one heading style at 96 pt, Flare increases the height of all of the style menu entries to that height, which unfortunately makes the menu pretty much unusable.

The solution was just to use the other ways of accessing the styles, displaying the styles window for example which doesn't seem to have this problem, and avoiding using the popup styles feature.

I went through everything else, validating the CSS file and etc, before finding the solution or at least the workaround.

Answer 2

The styles in the class menu come from a CSS file that might be corrupt or contain invalid syntax that Flare is parsing incorrectly.

1. Locate the CSS file (Default location within Flare: Content Explorer > Resources > Stylesheets > Styles.css).
2. Right-click the file and select Open with > NOTEPAD.EXE.
3. Copy the contents of the CSS file and validate it here: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/#validate_by_input

Fix the validation errors, then copy the results back into the CSS file and save you changes.