Difference between revisions of "Documentation/Writer for Students/Style Basics"

Revision as of 16:05, 18 May 2014

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We have already applied paragraph styles for headings and for the text body. Other elements such as footnotes, quotes, literature lists and so on all have their own styles. You can also create new styles as the need arises.

Paragraph Styles make life so much easier. They allow for complete uniformity of all types of text. So for instance all your indented quotes will look the same. Time saving is immeasurable: instead of having to scan the whole text for possible formatting mistakes you simply change the style in one central location, and all the elements belonging to that style get changed with it.

You get to the style list through Format › Styles and Formatting or else simply by pressing F11. At the very bottom of the list you can choose if you want to list all possible styles or only the ones you have applied so far.

You can change any existing style by right-clicking it and choosing Modify. You can create a new style by right-clicking on any existing style and choosing New. Using the small black triangle on the top right of the pop-up menu you can create a New Style from Selection, meaning a new paragraph style or page style based on the paragraph or page on which your cursor is situated at present.

Paragraph styles are no doubt the category most commonly used. But there are other categories: Character Styles (which I use here to highlight Menus Courier Bold 10,5pt), Frame Styles, Numbering Styles and – most importantly as you shall discover later – Page Styles (for instance for landscape format or for the first non-numbered page or pages).

Illustration 14. Here you see a list of all Applied Styles, i.e. those actually used in my text

“Default Formatting”?

Under the menu Format you will see the option Default Formatting (Ctrl + m). This term should not be confused with Default style! If you apply Default Formatting to any marked text, it will loose any formatting you may have applied to it manually and take all its formatting exclusively from the Paragraph style of the same name. This is very practical for “cleaning” purposes, e.g. after having imported a file from Word full of hidden formatting you want to get rid of.

Exporting Styles for re-use later on

You can export a style so as to be able to reuse it at some later date or even pass it on to other users (useful for group work). To do that, go to Menu File › Templates › Save and choose an appropriate name. In order to import a style you have saved, go to Menu Format › Styles and formatting and there choose the small black arrow pointing downwards in the menu bar. Here press Load Styles... You will be presented with a list of styles. Here you can choose which categories you would like to import and if the imported styles should overwrite existing styles (again very useful for postformatting group work).

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