Mysterious style application issue

[Declan]

Greetings!
I'm missing something obvious, but I don't know what it is.
If I select a style from the sidebar in order to apply it to a piece of text some but not all of the characteristics are applied.
For example, I have a style called Heading 3 which is 12 point Times New Roman with italics. If I select text and choose this style the formatting changes, but not completely. If the text was 14 Point bold, and I apply this style, italics are added, but the bold is not removed, nor is the font size changed. Why is this?
Or I have a style for indented quotations. The indentation is applied, but not the 11 point font size.
And if insert a footnote, which should be 11 point, the font size remains at 12 point, which I've been changing manually.
Since this behaviour is so clearly not the expected one, I imagine that there is some setting that I have chosen by mistake. Any guesses as to what I've done wrong?

Declan

[Groucho]

Hello, Declan, and welcome on board.

Maybe you need to select your styled text and click Format > Remove Attributes Except Styles. This will clean up any styled text and remove all underlying attributes. When I’m done applying styles to a document I always select all (Comand-A) and click Remove Attributes Except Styles.

Henry.

[martin]

Henry's explanation is correct. When you apply a style, that does not remove unrelated manual/override attributes (like bold) that were applied earlier. This is intentional. Consider a paragraph where you had italicized a movie title. If you apply your "Block Quote" style, you wouldn't want the italics to be removed as well.

[Declan]

Thanks.
My confusion comes from Mellel-thinking. There you apply the style and keep your italics or bold or whatever.
Good that's fine now.

Declan