[Solved] Reset button and Order of Styles

[MrProgrammer]

Hi,

I'm continuing my styles journey. Thank you for your patience. I have no idea in what order Styles should be created for a book that has a Title Page, Publishing Page, Foreword, Notes, Poetry Page, Chapters, Glossary, and End Notes. So I decided to simply test this by starting with the style Text Body as the first paragraph of the first Chapter. I also don't know what the style Default means?

I'm not sure what the difference is between Text Body and Text Body Indent, which may be part of a bigger problem that I don't know what the correct order is to set up styles to format a book, which may be because I do not understand the Organize tab in the Styles and what Next Style and Linked refer to. Do not despair, I am making progress.

So... I decided to test a style by skipping all the Front Matter of the book and simply putting the cursor in the first paragraph of text in the first Chapter of the book. I selected the Style "Text Body" and set the indent, line spacing, Font (leaving regular/italics/bold blank) and a few other things and then clicked on okay and double clicked on it to apply it. I was happy to note that it did everything it was supposed to, including leaving the italics and bold unaffected, so what had been bold remained bold and what had been italics had been italics.

I also found I could override (?) the orders given by the Style by clicking on one of the buttons at the top at the top of the page, like double-spacing. I checked the Style by clicking on Modify and found that although I had used the double-space button to change the line spacing, this change was not reflected in the Text Body style.

I then tried to undo all the changes by going to Text Body, right-clicking on Modify and hitting the Reset button, clicking okay and then when nothing changed, I double clicked it to apply the changes to the text I had used Text Body to modify. It didn't Reset anything. I also noticed when I hit the Reset button that nothing in the Modify box actually changed. I had early tried to undo a Style by using the simple back-up button above the document itself, so I already knew that that would not undo changes to style.

So, how do you undo a style? And how do you know which style to start with to format your book? Does the order matter or can you start anywhere? I feel like a layout outline would be helpful. First modify this, then that, then that.

[RoryOF]

Default Style sets the required typeface and size, its alignment,and other parameters. Then all sub-styles based on Default acquire these.

Usually one undoes a style by selecting its formatted text and pressing Ctrl M. Direct formatting, inserted by directly selecting formatting entries f rom the toolbar, takes precedence over the style formatting. If you had a paragraph formatted with a particular style, say Text Body, you can simply override this by using the Stylist (F11 key, or /Format /Styles and Formatting) by placing cursor in the paragraph and double clicking the new style required.

A useful overview of using styles is at
Structure Instructions

[MrProgrammer]

Here are my notes about styles in Calc, made from observation, not taken from any reference material:
Styles may contain partial settings. Modify Style»Organizer shows a list of all the settings contained in the style. Settings that are not in the style will come from the parent style. Removing settings from a style can be done using the "Standard" button. This restores the settings in only the selected group (Numbers, Font, Effects, Alignment, Borders, Background, or Protection) to those from the parent style. The "Reset" button discards the changes to the group which have been made since the style was opened for modification, even if changes have been made to other groups.

I presume styles in Writer work the same way they do in Calc. However Calc offers only two types: Cell Styles and Page Styles. Writer offers: Paragraph Styles, Character Styles, Frame Styles, List Styles, and Page Styles. Others here have far more experience than I with Writer and may have comments about my notes.

[RoryOF]

I cannot answer for Calc styles, as my Calc use is trivial. I think it would be unwise to assume Writer Styles behaved like Calc styles. My personal experience was that it took preparation of three 32 page text booklets, with some lllustrations, to become reasonably familiar with Writer styles.

I found the following documents useful on the subjects of Writer styles, particularly when working on longer documents in either OpenOffice or LibreOffice; the "Writer for Students" reference (2nd URL) is relatively brief.

See the file referenced in this posting for an overview
Structure Instructions

This document may also be informative:
Writer for students (several languages)

This document covers much the same ground as the previous document. It will be helpful for those writing a book
http://documentation.openoffice.org/whitepapers/Creating_large_documents_with_OOo.odt

Bruce Byfield's new book, Designing with LibreOffice, also covers Apache OpenOffice. It focuses on the use of styles and templates, mainly in Writer but with some info on Calc, Impress, and Draw.

A PDF of the book, and/or a zip file of the chapter ODTs, can be downloaded free from the book's website. If you prefer, you can buy a printed copy. http://designingwithlibreoffice.com

Another work on writing and formatting a book in LibreOffice is
To Tame a Writer

For Macs, there is much useful information in
Tutorial] Mac FAQ

[Bill]

I'm not sure what the difference is between Text Body and Text Body Indent...

In a new document, open the Styles and Formatting window, click the Paragraph Styles icon, right-click the Text body indent style and select Modify to open the Paragraph Style dialog which will show the settings for the Text body indent style. Click the Organizer tab. It shows "Linked with: Text body" which means that it inherits settings from the Text body style. The "Contains" section shows which settings are different in the Text body indent style. In this case it is only the Indent settings.