Text Styles

What is a Text Style?

A Text Style is a named collection of attributes, such as font, size, color, line spacing and other text attributes which can be applied to paragraphs and characters within a text column, area or line.

Text Styles are a powerful way to alter the appearance of text throughout a document with a few clicks. You are able to apply the same style to multiple paragraphs or characters. Updating the style will cause all paragraphs with the style applied to be updated.

Are styles automatically applied within my document?

The main text, sometimes called the body text of a document is a particular style, which we call Normal text style. Text added to a document will automatically inherit the style named Normal text. By updating that style to be, say, 12 point Times, then all Normal text throughout the document can be changed in one go, without having to select and apply the same font change over and over again.

By default there is a small set of pre-defined Styles: including ‘Normal text’ and three heading styles, Heading 1 to Heading 3.

What's the difference between a paragraph and character style?

Text Styles come in two varieties. Paragraph Styles apply to whole paragraphs, and are also typically used for headings. It’s not possible to apply a Paragraph Style to a smaller section than a paragraph, so you cannot, for example, apply a Paragraph Style to a single word within a paragraph. If you try, then the whole surrounding paragraph will take on this Style.

This means that you do not have to select the whole paragraph to apply a Paragraph Style. You can, for example, just place the text cursor anywhere on the line and select a Paragraph Style from the Style menu, and the whole paragraph will take on that Style.

Paragraph styles can define all text attributes except for bulleted/numbered list properties.

Color, Font type, Font weight, Font Size, Font style (normal / italic), Aspect ratio, Justification, Tracking, Underline , Script , Baseline shift, Line spacing, Margins (left and right), Indent, Space (before and after), Language, tab stops.

Character Styles, on the other hand, can be applied to any selection of text, from a single character upwards. For example, if you wanted to highlight certain words in your text in a different colour a Character Style would be ideal. The advantage is that you can then change the colour (or font, etc) of all these highlighted words with a single Style update.

Character styles can only define text attributes that can be applied to individual characters, such as text color, font size, font weight, etc.

How do I apply a new style to my text?

There is a new Styles drop-down menu on the Text Tool InfoBar, that allows you to create Styles, apply them to any text, and to update the definition of the Style.

To create a completely new Style:

• Change a selection of text to appear how you want

• Select the Create Style menu from the Style list drop-down on the Text Tool InfoBar.

If you want to create a new Paragraph Style it’s recommended that you select and apply your changes to a whole paragraph, before selecting the Create Style menu.

How do I update a style?

To update a Style definition:

• Select some text already in the style you want to update.
• Apply whatever changes you require, say an alternative font, or font size. - This will cause the style definition to display a + character to the right of its name
• Select Update style from the Style drop-down menu on the Text InfoBar.

For example to change all the Normal text to be a different font, select a few words in the Normal text Style, change the font (and any other attribute) and then Select Update Style from the Style Menu on the TextTool InfoBar

How do I remove a style?

he Styles list in the Styles menu includes the entry No style. Selecting this removes the Style (paragraph and/or character Style) from the selection and also resets the selected text back to default formatting.

How do I delete unused styles?

Styles that are not used anywhere in a document are automatically deleted when you save and re-load a document. However the default styles (Normal text and Heading 1 to 3) are never deleted

Can a style be based on another style?

A style can be based on another style allowing the new style to inherit the attributes of the style it is based upon.

As an example, you could update the style named Heading 1 to be based upon the style named Normal text. This would for example allow you to change the font family applied to Normal text. and the same change would be applied to Heading 1

1. Select some text within your document which has the style Heading 1 applied.
2. Select Properties from the Style drop list..
3. Click on the drop list labelled Based Upon and select Normal text and click on the OK button.
4. Select some text within your document which has the style Normal text applied.
5. Change the font applied.
6. Select Update style from the Style drop list..
7. The font applied to all instances Normal text and Heading 1 will be updated.