Styles: "Char"

[Guest]

Why do styles in MS Word sometimes contain the word "Char"?

 

[Guest]

I believe the Char indicates the style you are looking at is a character style.

There are four types of styles — paragraph, character, list, and table (list
and table styles are new as of Word 2002).

A character style can contain character formatting only, including font,
font size, font style (bold, italic, bold/italic), font effects (such as
small caps or superscript), character spacing, text borders and shading, and
even language settings.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

It's a little bit more insidious than that. A "char" style is one that has
been (usually inadvertently) created by applying a paragraph style to a
portion of a paragraph. They are the very devil to get rid of and sometimes
multiply uncontrollably (this has been called the "char char char bug"), but
I believe the problem was somewhat reduced by one of the Office XP service
packs.

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

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all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

Insidious it is. We have an outbreak. It shows up as a style on the style
lists but the Delete command does not get rid of it. (It may seem to; but
after we save and close the document or template, Char shows up again when we
reopen the document.)

Programmatically, Char is not accessible by name in the Styles collection.
In the WordML, it shows up as a value of w:link; not, apparently, as an
actiual style name. Although it can appear appended to the end of an actual
style name.

Is there a sure-fire way to get rid of this bug, short of recomposing each
document from scratch? Does anyone have a clue as to possible events that
trigger the bug?

We have automated processes that rely on strict adherence to style
conventions. I fear that the affected documents may not make it through such
processing. The problem may be spreading through the use of affected
templates.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

See http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister/MyFavTip.htm#CharStyl

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

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all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

Thanks again, Suzanne.

That routine seems to work for the spurious styles created by appending
"Char" to a real style, like "Steps Char Char."

However, we are dealing with a phantom style called "Char" that seems to be
a paragraph style. The following command, which displays "Char," tells us it
is linked to "Default Paragraph Font:"

MsgBox ActiveDocument.Styles("Default Paragraph Font").LinkStyle

However, the following commands are ineffectual:

doc.Styles("Char").LinkStyle = styl
styl.Delete

Any command I've tried with "document.Styles("Char")" generates an error
saying the specified member of the collection does not exist.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I'm afraid I don't do or understand VBA; perhaps Cindy will post with more
info.

--
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.