Hidden text is working as expected.
Your (mis- or rather no-) use of styles is responsible for what you see.
Default Style is the ancestor of all paragraph styles and is intended only to set defaults for all others. This is what you did modifying it to set Hidden text. This attribute propagates to all other styles and your document ends up fully invisible.
The real default style for body text is (surprisingly enough) Body Text… But even if you change Body Text to set hidden attribute, all your discourse will become invisible. Only the headings will still be visible.
You didn’t describe your intent with hidden text. Maybe you want to set aside from printing some comment or todo list or any other personal note. These paragraphs have a different role from the rest. Consequently, they should be style with a specific paragraph style. Think of paragraph styled as a way of documenting the role of the paragraph in the document (title, heading, body text, citation, comment, …) for you as an author. Then, you give different aspect (bold, italic, colour, hidden, font face, size, indents, spacings, …) to the styles to achieve the necessary aesthetics effect.
But, by no means, never ever use Default Style to write any line in your document. Always use a targeted style.
In case you want to describe your intent so that you get a more specific advice, edit your question. Don’t use an answer which is reserved for “solutions”.
To show the community your question has been answered, click the ✓ next to the correct answer, and “upvote” by clicking on the ^ arrow of any helpful answers. These are the mechanisms for communicating the quality of the Q&A on this site. Thanks!
EDIT 1
In any case, don’t use Default Style. As stated above, modifying it impacts all other styles. Use Body Text for your non-specific text, another ad-hoc style when text has a special significance.
You have 2 solutions for your requirement.
-
Your goal is only to have a view of the document structure (without printing it)
Use the navigator (F5) or equivalently the sidepane. Click on the compass. Under the Headings category, all your heading are listed. The small triangles at left allow you to develop or close a chapter. You then choose the level of detail you want.
-
You want to print a reduced version of your document
-
Set Hidden text in the styles you want to hide. Caution! This will apply globally and is probably too coarse for you
-
A more elaborate solution is based on “conditions”. Portions of text will be removed from display depending on the value of user variables. It is quite well explained in the built-in help: F1 and type ‘defining conditions’ as search item.
This can be as selective as you fancy. An example is producing a customised contract or descriptive document where clauses are selected based on the values of several variables.
