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Another flavor of Word styles.
CONTENTS
Less prevalent, but nonetheless useful, are Word’s character level styles.
As discussed in previous lessons, the formatting possibilities or Word can be understood as falling into categories or levels. The two we’ve been concern with are Paragraph level and Character level formatting.
Word styles come in two varieties, that parallel Paragraph and Character formatting: Paragraph styles and Character styles.
The last tutorial familiarized you with Paragraph styles. This one concentrates on Character styles.
Paragraph formatting, as you may recall, affect at the very least, whole paragraphs.
In a parallel manner, Paragraph Styles affect whole paragraphs.
Character formatting can affect as small a unit as one individual character.
In a parallel manner, Character Styles affect individual characters.
This example uses the text shown in #include “include-beforeIMG.txt”Figure A
. If you don’t wish to type this text in, you can copy it via this link. (This example parallels one used in Lie & Bos’ book Cascading Style Sheets; see sources)
Figure A: Text for Exercise 4A
The words shown in the Style Area are names of paragraph styles linked to each paragraph. [For this exercise, paragraph style links can be considered irrelevant. Later, we’ll talk about the interaction of paragraph and character styles.]
We’ll now create a character style that will be used to format the Word “Polonius”. Once defined and tagged, we will then have centralized control over all text tagged to this style.
Name the style “Polonius”. Set the style type as “Character”. Your dialog should look like #include “include-beforeIMG.txt”Figure B
Figure B: The New style dialog just before hitting OK. Note we are here creating a new character style named “Polonius”.
In the same way as with Paragraph style creation, when creating character style Polonius, we not only create it but also apply it to the selected text (recall the last button clicked was “Apply”; this was the default choice).
While the highlight remains on the phrase “Polonius:” notice that the styles box reads Polonius, the name of the style we created. In general the style box reflects the style that’s tagged to the selected text. Character style names are not indicated in the Style Area, so you must pay closer attention to the state of the Style Box to know exactly which character style is linked to a portion of text.
We’ll now apply style Polonius. This is very similar to the same way you applied (or tagged) Paragraph styles to text.
That’s it. Style Polonius is now tagged to both instances of the phrase “Polonius:”.
NOTE: Although for both Character and Paragraph styles we went to the trouble of selecting all of the text we wished to tag before applying the style, fully highlighting all text is not really necessary. Check the Tips page regarding selection for various levels of formatting.
We’ll now create a character style that will format the Word “Hamlet”. Once defined and tagged, we’ll create “centralized control” over all text tagged to this style.
We’ll define style Hamlet to be
We’ll now apply style Hamlet.
That’s it. Style Hamlet is now tagged to both instances of the phrase “Hamlet:”.
At this point, your document should appear something like figure __.
Figure C: After applying Hamlet and Polonius styles.
Granted, this is small example and that the real drama of styles comes when using them in long documents. Nonetheless, with these styles now applied, modifying the document is easy. The example below give you practice modifying these two Character styles.
We’ll modify style Hamlet to change it’s formatting to:
To modify the formatting of the style, follow these steps:
The text should now appear as in #include “include-beforeIMG.txt”Figure D
.
Figure D: After modifying style Hamlet.
For extra (personal) credit, try modifying style Polonius.
You should now understand that Paragraph styles affect whole paragraph chunks; character styles can affect single characters, irrespective of paragraph marks.
Somewhat self evidently, only character formatting can be specified in a character style definition.
You might have observed that character styles “inherit” the character properties from the underlying paragraph style. In the very last examples, the Font formatting of the underlying Normal style is Font “Times New Roman” (the default for most Word users). The properties specified by Polonius and Hamlet styles result in formatting that leaves font “Times New Roman” in place. This is because we didn’t specify font name in the style definition.
In the modified version of the styles (above), we changed style Hamlet to specify a font name. This property, in a manner of speaking “overlaid” the font name property of style normal.
This may be more clear after you do the following exercise:
Here we’ll change the character formatting of style Normal and see the effect on the document’s formatting. Remember, Normal is a paragraph style. The
This example should clarify how character styles can add to or overlay the underlying formatting that comes from a paragraph style.
This exercise continues using the same document as used in Exercise 4A, above.
The document should now appear as in #include “include-beforeIMG.txt”Figure E
.
Figure E: After modifying paragraph style Normal.
Notice that the text tagged with styles Polonius and Hamlet was only affected by the font family change in Normal, the change to Arial (recall, we changed the font name, also called font family, to Arial). Both Hamlet- and Polonius-styled text retained the colors we’d specified in their definitions. Polonius also retained the font ShellyVolante since the Polonius font explicitly stated this font name.
In general, character styles act to let the character formatting of the underlying paragraph style show through in those properties which are not explicitly stated. Another way of saying this is that character styles can selectively “over-ride” formatting inherited from underlying paragraphs.
[HERE you are asked to apply character styles to the Constitution document]
Only character formatting can be specified in a character style definition.
Character styles “overlay” the existing character formatting of the paragraph they’re applied to.
Character styles will affect only the selected text. Paragraph styles will affect whole paragraphs.
The next tutorial now turns to a discussion of Tips and Tricks that will improve your use of styles.
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