# CSS property dialogs

Most menu items in the CSS menu lets you specify CSS properties. What happens when you select such a menu item is the following.

First Alpha checks if there already are any values for the selected set of properties. Let's say you have the following in your document

    H1 {
        color: #123456;
        text-align: right;
    }

and the current position is somewhere between the braces. If you now choose Text from the CSS menu, Alpha first looks for all text properties between the braces. In this case it would find text-align: right.

A dialog window is now opened where you can specify the various properties. In the example, 'right' will be the default value for 'text-align' as that was the value found. If Alpha finds something it doesn't understand a warning message it shown. Everything Alpha doesn't understand will then be ignored.

When you have specified the values you want they are inserted and any old values are deleted, in the example 'text-align: right'.

Because Alpha first inserts the new values and then deletes the old, you may have use 'Undo' more than ones to undo something.

### ! important

In CSS it is possible to increase the weight of a declaration by adding ! important at the end, for example

    H1 {
        color: #FF0000 ! important;
    }

In the property dialogs there is no way to say that a property should be marked by ! important, but if you make a change by using a property dialog Alpha remembers which ones are important and marks the same properties as important after the change.

### The property dialogs

General things to note:

- When you specify a length or size, like for font-size, you can type the unit in the textbox rather than selecting it in the menu (faster). If you type a unit the one in the menu is ignored.
- In some cases there is a shorthand for a set of properties. Then there are two checkboxes at the bottom of the dialog window.
  Inherit all means that you give the value 'inherit' to the shorthand property and ignore the individual values. Checking Use shorthand form if possible will make Alpha try to express the properties using the shorthand. Otherwise all individual properties are inserted into the document.
- For some properties, like margin, you can specify values for one or two sides and let these values also apply to the other sides. For such properties there will be two radio buttons where you can choose if you want to set the values individually or if you want the values specified also apply to the other sides.

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