Avoiding Direct Formatting

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ridge Kennedy
  • Start date Start date
R

Ridge Kennedy

I want to use styles properly and as much as possible, per wisdom or Word
experts. I also know that Word does funky things when a user boldfaces or
italicizes a section of text in a paragraph that is formatted using styles,
creating a new StyleName + Bold in a list of styles.

So, in situations where a user wants to boldface a few words for emphasis or
italicize a title, what is best practice? Is there a way to avoiding direct
formatting of text in these situations?

Ridge (in New Joisey)
 
There is no reason for avoiding direct formatting in most such instances as
those you mention. In cases where the formatting has a particular meaning,
you may want to create a character style. This has two advantages:

1. If you later want to change the formatting of all the text to which this
style is applied, you need only modify the style. For example, in a
dictionary I'm creating, I want the defined terms to be Bold, C&lc, and
cross-references to be Small Caps, so I've defined character styles to apply
to these two elements. I happen to know that the publisher will change all
the defined terms to Bold, All Caps; the compositor (being an idiot) will
very likely do this manually, but at least I've *tried* to make it easy for
him.

2. In current versions of Word, Ctrl+Spacebar treats character styles the
same as any other direct formatting, but in Word 2007, it is possible to
remove direct font formatting while leaving formatting applied by character
styles.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
You can apply character styles if you want. In most templates the Strong
style is bold and the Emphasis style is italics. I've changed my Ctrl-B and
Ctrl-I shortcuts to implement those character styles (but left the toolbar
buttons alone in case I really do want direct formatting). To turn them off,
I use Ctrl-spacebar.
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide




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