Control which attribute of a text style is active

[Wolfgang Baer]

In the H&M writer environment a user can create styles.

There are three types of them:
- Table-Styles (appearance of tables)
- Para-Styles (appearance of a paragraph and text)
- Text-Styles (appearance of text)

The wish is about the latter two.

Background:
To get a consistent look for a manual, writers should use manual formatting as infrequently as possible.
To assist them they should find Para-Styles which define how a paragraph looks (font, line spacing, etc.).

Example:
Headline-Para-Style (Font Arial, left aligned)
Body-Para-Style (Font Cambria, justified)
Code-Para-Style (Font Courier, left aligned)

On top of this the writer might ask for a feature to emphasis individual words within a paragraph.

E.g. he wants:
- bold,
- italic,
- bold+italic
- green

Normally he would use the manual formatting for this. But in this case it would be difficult to later on change the design.
E.g. the boss decides he does not want bold as highlight anymore, instead he wants red color without bold.
So naturally one would think Text-Styles would be the solution for this.

But in my opinion there is a limitation with Text-Styles:
They always overwrite all text attributes of a selected text not a user chosen one.

What does that mean for the example?
We have
- Headline-Para-Style (Font Arial, left aligned)
- Body-Para-Style (Font Cambria, justified)
- Code-Para-Style (Font Courier, left aligned)

The idea is to create one Text-Style with the attribute bold,
But the way H&M works today, this is not possible. One can only make a Text-Style
with ALL text attributes active (the font face, font weight, font color etc.).

E.g. one makes a Text-Style with font = Arial and weight = bold.
If he now assigns this to the Body-Para-Style it will overwrite its Cambria regular font with Arial bold font.
But this is not intended. Only the bold attribute is requested not the font attribute.

In general this seems to be a big limitation of the Text-Styles.
If one wants bold driven by a style for each Para-Style, he would need to create three Text-Styles instead of one (one for Cambria bold, one for Arial bold, one for Courier bold). But even this might cause a problem. If the font face of the Para-Style gets changed later on (e.g. the boss wants TimeNewRoman instead of Cambria) then the text style does not change with it. Result is, that the user needs to change the Para-Style and the Text-Style.

This gets more complex with more variations. If there are three Para-Styles and four emphasis designs then a multiplication is required.

Three Para-Styles
- Headline-Para-Style (Font Arial, left aligned)
- Body-Para-Style (Font Cambria, justified)
- Code-Para-Style (Font Courier, left aligned)

Four emphasis designs

- bold,
- italic,
- bold+italic
- green

Results in
12 Text-Styles:

Headline-Para-Style Arial
Headline-Text-Style Arial bold
Headline-Text-Style Arial bold+italic
Headline-Text-Style Arial italic
Headline-Text-Style Arial green

Body-Para-Style Cambria
Body-Text-Style Cambria bold
Body-Text-Style Cambria bold+italic
Body-Text-Style Cambria italic
Body-Text-Style Cambria green

and so on.

So the wish is, that I can tell a text style which font attribute it should overwrite.
In the example above I could create four Text-Styles and decide they should overwrite the font's weight or color.
That's all. No need to make individual Text-Styles for individual Para-Styles. So instead of 12 Text-Styles I would only need four.

[Bregje van Ginneken]

This is on my wishlist too!

[Tobias Escher]

On mine, too! More control over what part of a text style is applied would be great.