Basic Working Procedures > Text Formatting and Styles

Whenever you edit a style all the text in your project formatted with the style is updated automatically and immediately. In addition to this any changes you make to styles will automatically be inherited by any other styles based on that style. This makes it possible to make changes to entire families of styles very quickly and easily by editing the parent styles. For example, you can normally change the base font in your entire document by changing the font of the Normal style.

1.	Select Styles > Edit Styles in the Write tab, then select Add Style to define a new style.

2.	Enter a name for the style and then select Font Settings, Paragraph Settings and Borders and Background to change the style attributes. See The Write Tab for details in the settings in these dialogs.

3.	Don't forget to define a keyboard shortcut for styles that you want to use frequently. This will speed up your work a lot!

1.	Click in a paragraph or in text formatted with the style you want to change (the style name will be displayed in the style selector in Write > Font).

2.	Select Styles > Edit Styles in the Write tab. The style at the cursor is selected for editing automatically.

3.	Select Font Settings, Paragraph Settings and Borders and Background to change the style attributes. See The Write Tab for details in the settings in these dialogs.

4.	Define different settings for Print View (PDF, RTF, printed manuals) and Help View (electronic formats). See Help and print styles for more details on these two sets of settings.

5.	Define keyboard shortcuts for styles you want to use frequently.

All text formatted with the styles you edit will be changed immediately.

Select Reset Style to completely reset all of the style's attributes to the settings of its parent style (the style listed in the Based on Style: field). If the style has no parent it will be set to the Help & Manual defaults.

Change the style's parent:

To change a style's parent select a different parent style in the Based on Style: field. Any style attributes that were set explicitly in the style will remain unchanged. All other style attributes will be changed to those of the new parent style.

Eliminate the style's parent:

To eliminate the style's parent just select (None) in the Based on Style: field. This will prevent the style from inheriting any attributes from any other styles. It will also make the style the first parent in a new style tree. This can be useful under some circumstances. See Style organization strategies for details.

Rename a style:

Just select the style in the Edit Styles dialog and edit the name. You can change the name of a style whenever you like, it will be updated automatically throughout your project.

You can also modify a style on the basis of a modified paragraph or text formatted with the style. This is often the easiest way to edit a style because it is much easier to see your formatting in the editor.

1.	Use the manual formatting tools to format a paragraph or some text formatted with the style you want to change.

2.	Make sure that the cursor is inside the formatted text, then select Styles > Create Style from Selection in the Write tab.

You don't need to select any text, the cursor must only be inside the formatted text you want to use as a model. If you do select text it should all be formatted in the same way – don't try to create a style based on text with some words formatted in one way and some in another!

3.	Select the Change existing style option in the dialog displayed. The style at the cursor should be selected automatically. If it isn't close the dialog and check the position of the cursor in the editor.

The Assign paragraph attributes option will be selected automatically for paragraph styles and deselected for text styles. Only change this if you want to change the style type. (See Paragraph and text styles for details on changing the style type.)

4.	Click on OK to apply the changes to the selected style.

See Defining styles for details on using this function to create a new styles.