First beware of the AutoUpdate option in the Organizer
tab of the style definition. I rather strongly recommend to not check this box. It is somehow a poor substitute to real style formatting for people coming from Word and used to its workflow heavily based on direct formatting. When checked, a seemingly innocuous direct change on a paragraph may have unexpected effect everywhere.
If modifying Text Body does not cause the paragraphs to update, it is a sign you have direct formatting on these paragraphs. Any action on toolbar icons is direct formatting, not only bold or italic. You may have used Set Line Spacing button and you don’t remember it. This is enough to “lock” the line spacing and prevent update by the style. Even if you use the button to set line spacing to the exact same value as in the style, this is still a “forcing” value overriding the style setting.
The fact it works with font face and size just says these settings were not overridden by direct formatting.
The only way to recover to normal style behaviour is to get rid of all direct formatting.
You mention you don’t want to lose some of the direct formatting. This is also the sign that you didn’t understand the purpose of styles: they are not intended to mark typographical variations in your text but to give semantic significance to parts of the text. You translate this significance by configuring the styles for typographical attributes as a consequence of the significance. Therefore, if some Text Body paragraph have a different alignment from others, then they have not the same significance and should receive another style (perhaps derived from Text Body so they inherit most of the attributes and changes to Text Body also apply to them).
Don’t neglect character styles. They say that the words within a paragraph have not the same “value” as the others. You should not bold a word with Ctrl
+B
but mark it with Strong Emphasis or another style whose name will “explain” why it is formatted differently. Note also that bold words, rendered identically, may be styled differently because they don’t belong in the same significance.
Maintaining a 500-page document is impossible if you don’t implement a consistent collection of styles (paragraph, character, page, frame and list – all are equally important and contribute to the “comfort” and ease of formatting).
Forget about typographical attributes to focus your attention, as an author, on the significance and semantic value of paragraphs and words. This is the most important part. The appearance comes later. With an appropriate style markup you should be able to change completely the appearance of your document without the need to re-read it. And in a matter of a very small number of minutes.
Then no bug but a wrong workflow.
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