Delete a paragraph style from my personal style collection?

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derekroff
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Joined: 2006-12-12 09:39:15

Delete a paragraph style from my personal style collection?

Post by derekroff »

I searched for "delete style" in the forum, in Help, in the User Guide, and in the FAQ. It's hard to believe that I am the first person who wanted to do this. I did find a thread called "Remove a user defined paragraph style?", but that deals with removing a paragraph style from a specific document, rather than from the style collection. I have half a dozen that I don't want, because Nisus creates them when I am trying to do something else. My view of "intuitive" differs from that of the program.

Every option that I've tried does either nothing or warns me that I will delete the entire style collection. I began this search with the belief that there must be a way to delete a single style, but now I have doubts. Please, tell me there is some hope of reasonable management of the styles that I create. I'm using Nisus Writer Pro 2.1.3 on a new MacBook Pro, El Capitán 10.11.3, with all updates.
Derek Roff
Language Learning Center
University of New Mexico
derek@unm.edu
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martin
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Re: Delete a paragraph style from my personal style collecti

Post by martin »

Hello Derek: I'm sorry this has been a frustrating experience. It's definitely possible to do what you want and delete styles from your style collection. Let's walk you through it.

First, just to clarify, it sounds like you're working with our Style Library feature. This is an area of Nisus Writer that can be viewed in a variety of ways, but one way is by using the menu Insert > New Style > Show Style Library. Another way is to open the Document Manager and select the "Style Library" group.

Once you have your Style Library displayed, here are a few ways to delete styles from a particular collection:

1. In the top-right part of the window, from the style collecting listing, select the collection you want to edit. Now in the bottom-right area below, from the constituent styles listing, select just the style(s) you want to remove from the collection. Press the Delete key on your keyboard.

2. Select and open a style collection (eg: select it and click the Open button) to display it as an editable NWP document. You can then switch to the stylesheet using the menu View > Style Sheet and edit the styles as you would in any other document. After you delete the unwanted styles, save and close the document.

I hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any questions.
derekroff
Posts: 7
Joined: 2006-12-12 09:39:15

Re: Delete a paragraph style from my personal style collecti

Post by derekroff »

Thank you, Martin. Following your item 1, I had previously gotten to the Document Manager window, and selected an individual style. From there, I had tried the delete button at the bottom of the window, the minus button, and right-clicking on the style. None of these work. For whatever reason, I didn't think if the delete key on the keyboard. Thanks.

On your item 2, I had also previously selected a style, and clicked Open (although at the moment, I am seeing "Activate"). It does open what looks like a regular document, with a couple of lines of text that do NOT relate to the style that I selected. Just as you say, if I choose View>Style Sheet, delete a style sheet, and save the document, it does delete it from the style library. This is completely opposite of what happens, if I do the same steps when in a regular document. I NEVER would have figured this out, without your help. I'm reminded of an old Dilbert cartoon, where he is creating a new App, and he says to himself something like, "In order to make it user friendly, I will let the user edit the source code, so they can customize it to their preferences."

One of the ways that I get extra styles that I don't want, is by trying to create a new style. I select some text, choose Insert>New Style>Paragraph Style from Selection, and give the new style a unique new name. Then I click Save to Style Library, and Add styles to existing style collection (at the moment, it seems to me like "style library" and "style collection" are used somewhat randomly). When I click Save, I get the warning that a style with a matching name already exists in the document, even though I just created a unique name. I can click Cancel, Replace Existing, or Rename Pasted. None of these seems like what I want. And indeed, I have tried all of them, and none of them are what I want. How about option 4? Save the new style that I just created, and leave everything else alone? Is there any way to get that?

Renamed Pasted seems like the most likely choice, although I don't think I pasted anything. It creates copies of one or more of my previous style names. It often doesn't create a new style with the unique name that I just created. At least I can't see it, when I view the Show Style Library. Sometimes, it shows up later, and I haven't yet figured out why I seem to be getting differing behaviors from the same steps. Replace Existing also doesn't produce a new style with the name that I just created. Cancel does what I expect, but it doesn't get me closer to my goal.
Derek Roff
Language Learning Center
University of New Mexico
derek@unm.edu
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phspaelti
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Re: Delete a paragraph style from my personal style collecti

Post by phspaelti »

derekroff wrote: One of the ways that I get extra styles that I don't want, is by trying to create a new style. I select some text, choose Insert>New Style>Paragraph Style from Selection, and give the new style a unique new name. Then I click Save to Style Library, and Add styles to existing style collection (at the moment, it seems to me like "style library" and "style collection" are used somewhat randomly). When I click Save, I get the warning that a style with a matching name already exists in the document, even though I just created a unique name. I can click Cancel, Replace Existing, or Rename Pasted. None of these seems like what I want. And indeed, I have tried all of them, and none of them are what I want. How about option 4? Save the new style that I just created, and leave everything else alone? Is there any way to get that?

Renamed Pasted seems like the most likely choice, although I don't think I pasted anything. It creates copies of one or more of my previous style names. It often doesn't create a new style with the unique name that I just created. At least I can't see it, when I view the Show Style Library. Sometimes, it shows up later, and I haven't yet figured out why I seem to be getting differing behaviors from the same steps. Replace Existing also doesn't produce a new style with the name that I just created. Cancel does what I expect, but it doesn't get me closer to my goal.
The dialog you are getting is the style conflict dialog. The problem is almost certainly that the style you are creating is based on an existing style (the most common culprit is "Normal") which is already defined (slightly) differently in the collection you are trying to save your new style to. Note that the conflict dialog should be telling you which style is in conflict.
Style Conflict dialog.tiff
Style Conflict dialog.tiff (38.09 KiB) Viewed 5237 times
So in this example, if I go ahead with the default, my style collection will contain my new style plus a style called "Normal 1", and the new style will be based on "Normal 1" (not the "Normal" already existing in the library). I guess it's true that Nisus should have an option of "Keep/Use Existing", which would then adjust the new style to be based on the already existing style. In that case users might be surprised to find that their newly defined style ends up not looking like what they saved (or thought they were saving). The way to get there currently involves the following steps:
  1. Accept the default ("Rename Pasted")
  2. Open the style collection document
  3. Go to the style sheet and locate your newly added style
  4. Change its 'based on' from 'Normal 1' to 'Normal'
  5. Remove the 'Normal 1' from the style collection document
Anyhow, at least for me, 90% of the time the difference is really some minimal adjustment to Normal that I don't remember making.
Last edited by phspaelti on 2016-02-19 23:54:13, edited 2 times in total.
philip
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phspaelti
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Re: Delete a paragraph style from my personal style collecti

Post by phspaelti »

derekroff wrote:(at the moment, it seems to me like "style library" and "style collection" are used somewhat randomly)
This is not true at all. The style library is the single repository of all your style collections. Style collections correspond to actual documents (which may or may not have any content). Each collection is a single document, and all the styles in the document are part of that collection.

As Martin already said you can just open those documents and edit the styles in them. So you might be better off creating your new styles in the style collection document, rather than trying to save styles from open documents into them. This should avoid the style conflict business.
philip
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martin
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Re: Delete a paragraph style from my personal style collecti

Post by martin »

derekroff wrote:Just as you say, if I choose View>Style Sheet, delete a style sheet, and save the document, it does delete it from the style library.
...
I NEVER would have figured this out, without your help.
I'm happy to help, but your point is well taken. If the user opens a style collection for editing, the document should default to showing the stylesheet. There's no reason to open the file showing the irrelevant and potentially misleading document content. I'll file a change request, thank you.

As for the rest of your confusions, I think Philip has explained it perfectly. If you still have any questions, please let us know.
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