new user confused when mixing character & paragraph styles

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chabotd
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Joined: 2014-03-03 10:20:49

new user confused when mixing character & paragraph styles

Post by chabotd »

Hi, I am new to Nisus Writer Pro and hope it will be more stable and less buggy than Word has been for me. One of my first tasks has been to create new styles. At first I did not see reasons to use character styles when defining a new paragraph style, I could just as well specify font, size, bold, etc. from there. But I noticed the built-in styles had a character style for different header levels, and paragraph styles as well, presumably the font characteristics for the paragraph styles coming from the character styles of same header level.

So I created a new Bodytext_c character style, and then went on to create a new Bodytext_p paragraph style. I thought that I could specify the look of my font with the Format menu, character style submenu, and my Bodytext_c style, but when I did that, I left the Bodytext_p editing window and ended up in the Bodytext_c editing window. Counterintuitive. It does seem that I have to select my font with Format/Font family, Format/Font size, Format/Font style, etc.

Is this the case? This would make character styles not very useful, once you have paragraph styles.

Thanks in advance,

Denis
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phspaelti
Posts: 1313
Joined: 2007-02-07 00:58:12
Location: Japan

Re: new user confused when mixing character & paragraph styl

Post by phspaelti »

Hello Denis, welcome to the Nisus community here.

'Built-in styles'?

I think only the paragraph style Normal is built-in in any sense. Anyhow you can arrange the styles in any way you see fit.

I actually agree with your first idea: there is no reason to use character styles when defining paragraph styles. A common set up is to have basic character features (font, size, color) defined in the paragraph style Normal, and have other paragraph styles based on Normal (directly or indirectly). That way you can easily change the overall font set up. I am pretty sure that is the way Nisus comes 'out of the box'.

I generally use character styles for 'special' attributes that will not match up with a paragraph (such as italic for emphasis etc.), but also for languages that require special spelling and keyboard settings etc.

Actually something just occurred to me. If you have a paragraph style with an attached character style, perhaps this comes from an imported document? Because otherwise, it is, as you found out, impossible to attach a character style as part of the definition of a paragraph style in Nisus. If you have such a document, I would suggest transferring the relevant attributes to the paragraph style and removing the character style from the definition of the style.
philip
chabotd
Posts: 11
Joined: 2014-03-03 10:20:49

Re: new user confused when mixing character & paragraph styl

Post by chabotd »

Hi Philip,

Actually knowing that character styles cannot be "attached" to paragraph style is useful, I'll stop searching for how it could be done!

As for the idea that what described may have come from importing a document produced elsewhere, it was not. I was referring to the manual and I probably saw more into it than the authors intended. See the manual on p. 96. For the character styles Heading 1 to Heading 6, it says "used for X level headings". As normally you would use a paragraph style for different heading levels, I assumed (wrongly, as it was) that the appropriate paragraph heading styles used these character heading styles to define the font attributes.

Off-topic now:
The manual was a big chunk to analyse and I have left some parts (macros mostly) for later, but as a very proficient Word user, the concepts were not new to me and Nisus Writer Pro seems to handle them well. Word had all the features I needed, mind you (and many useless ones), but I found myself all too ofter fighting with it to get the job done. I hope I won't have to with Nisus. We will see. I also use LaTeX, but my work requires sharing document with Word users and heavy use of modification tracking, which I could not get with LaTeX. I hope compatibility with Word will be good enough for me to work with Nisus. All my colleagues are on PC and it seems that one first difficulty will be their figures, which are usually in EMF format and display as a big rectangle with an X in it in Nisus. Hopefully it will still be there when I sent it back to a PC using colleague...

Denis
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phspaelti
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Joined: 2007-02-07 00:58:12
Location: Japan

Re: new user confused when mixing character & paragraph styl

Post by phspaelti »

Hi Denis,
chabotd wrote:I was referring to the manual and I probably saw more into it than the authors intended. See the manual on p. 96. For the character styles Heading 1 to Heading 6, it says "used for X level headings". As normally you would use a paragraph style for different heading levels, I assumed (wrongly, as it was) that the appropriate paragraph heading styles used these character heading styles to define the font attributes.
I see. The style sheet described there is the standard set-up, and Heading 1 - 6 are paragraph styles, as you were assuming, not character styles. (The blue icons mark paragraph styles, and the purple one character styles.)
chabotd wrote:Off-topic now:
The manual was a big chunk to analyse and I have left some parts (macros mostly) for later, but as a very proficient Word user, the concepts were not new to me and Nisus Writer Pro seems to handle them well. Word had all the features I needed, mind you (and many useless ones), but I found myself all too ofter fighting with it to get the job done. I hope I won't have to with Nisus. We will see. I also use LaTeX, but my work requires sharing document with Word users and heavy use of modification tracking, which I could not get with LaTeX. I hope compatibility with Word will be good enough for me to work with Nisus. All my colleagues are on PC and it seems that one first difficulty will be their figures, which are usually in EMF format and display as a big rectangle with an X in it in Nisus. Hopefully it will still be there when I sent it back to a PC using colleague...
Indeed the manual is pretty dense, and I can't really imagine trying to read the whole thing :) But I have been using Nisus for a little while now, so I can get away with it.
I really think that you will find that Nisus makes it possible to take advantage of those powerful features without the need to fight it. I also think you can safely defer macros. But let me just recommend one of Nisus' main features: Find and Replace. As a LaTeX user you are probably familiar with regular expressions, and Nisus Find and Replace gives access to that either in a standard interface, or a more user-friendly 'Powerfind' version.

Cheers
philip
chabotd
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Re: new user confused when mixing character & paragraph styl

Post by chabotd »

Oops, you are right, the styles I mentioned were paragraph styles, and the ones with similar names that are character styles in my document were created when I imported it from Word! Sorry for the confusion.
phspaelti wrote:Hi Denis,
chabotd wrote:I was referring to the manual and I probably saw more into it than the authors intended. See the manual on p. 96. For the character styles Heading 1 to Heading 6, it says "used for X level headings". As normally you would use a paragraph style for different heading levels, I assumed (wrongly, as it was) that the appropriate paragraph heading styles used these character heading styles to define the font attributes.
I see. The style sheet described there is the standard set-up, and Heading 1 - 6 are paragraph styles, as you were assuming, not character styles. (The blue icons mark paragraph styles, and the purple one character styles.)
Thanks again,

Denis
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martin
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Re: new user confused when mixing character & paragraph styl

Post by martin »

chabotd wrote:So I created a new Bodytext_c character style, and then went on to create a new Bodytext_p paragraph style. I thought that I could specify the look of my font with the Format menu, character style submenu, and my Bodytext_c style, but when I did that, I left the Bodytext_p editing window and ended up in the Bodytext_c editing window. Counterintuitive. It does seem that I have to select my font with Format/Font family, Format/Font size, Format/Font style, etc.
Although Philip is correct that you cannot "attach" a character style to a paragraph style (I would rephrase this by saying a paragraph style's attributes cannot contain/enforce a character style), Nisus Writer will allow you to base your paragraph style on a character style. So, for example, you could base your Normal paragraph style on some "Default Font" character style. But how your styles are structured is really up to you, and there's no need to do it that way unless you find it convenient.
All my colleagues are on PC and it seems that one first difficulty will be their figures, which are usually in EMF format and display as a big rectangle with an X in it in Nisus. Hopefully it will still be there when I sent it back to a PC using colleague...
EMF/WMF is an image format specific to Windows, which unfortunately there's no built-in support for on the Mac / OSX. I just tested to see if Nisus Writer would preserve the EMF image in the file when resaved as RTF, and although the EMF data is indeed included, something is preventing Word from picking it up. I'd consider this a compatibility bug in Nisus, so we'll need to take a look at fixing that. Sorry for the trouble.
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