Is it possible to have multiple character styles?

Is it possible to have multiple character styles on a selected text?

As far as I am aware, assigning one character style will replace the current style. Is there a way to have both?

Using MacOS , LO 6.2.0.3

No, not at the moment anyway.

In the past there was a hidden method (ctrl+click in the sidebar, or something along those lines, which AFAIK doesn’t work any more). Within the last year or so here was some discussion on Bugzilla within the last year or so on how to do the feature properly, but there were concerns about the UI or the feature itself being too complex (something I tend to disagree with), and it never led anywhere.

Thanks for the answer. I know that there might be some issues as when the two styles have competing values. I was thinking more along the lines of HTML, where a class is used to designate a type, and not just an appearance.

Not so much that. The properties of the second (inner) style could just override those of the first (parent) when relevant. One issue is that it’s hard to tell what’s going on just by looking at the page. For example, it can be hard to tell whether style B is nested inside style A, or whether B is just surrounded by separate segments of style A. Also, the interface for displaying such information (for example, in the sidebar) becomes much more complicated. Same for the mechanism for adding/removing/replacing styles. I don’t think these are good enough reasons to dismiss the feature (I’ve been in situations where it’s exactly what is needed to produce a sane, maintainable document), but a lot of effort and care are required to do it right. As-is, LibreOffice can’t even show the current paragraph, character, and other styles at the cursor all together, either in the toolbar or the sidebar.

I was looking for this feature as well. Thanks to this answer and some experimentation, I found that selecting a second character style and SHIFT double-clicking the second style applied the second style in addition to the original character style. I’m on MacOS, but I suspect it would work similarly on other platforms as well.

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@moldstadt Thanks for the tip. Works also under Linux (here Fedora 35, LO 7.2.7.2.).