Libreoffice 4.2 4.2 / Linux Ubuntu 14.04 / English
Hi, I have defined a new paragraph style (called “AQuote”), with the following settings (I mention only the ones I changed):
Organizer:
Next Style: Default Style
Linked with: Default Style
Category: Text Styles
[this one forced by the program: I selected Custom but it turned to Text Styles
when I opened it again in Modify mode from Styles and Formatting]
Indents & Spacing:
Before text: 1.20 cm
Above paragraph: 0.70 cm
Below paragraph: 0.70 cm
Checked: Don't add space between paragraphs of the same style
Font:
Gentium
10 pt
My Default style uses URW Palladio L 12 pt. A typical instance of my prob is the following:
I type one or more paragraphs in Default Style. Then I select the paragraphs and double click AQuote (either in the Styles and Formatting window or in the dropdown menu). The paragraph formatting (indents and spaces) is applied to the selected text but the font formatting (font type and size) is not.
I have found out an untidy workaround. If I define a new character style (which I also called “AQuote” in the faint hope it would be applied automatically) with the same font specs as the paragraph style and apply it to the text previously formatted, the font formatting is correctly applied (preserving bold and italics). But this looks like a poor solution, sort of slapdash. Moreover, it seems to behave erratically: if instead of making new styles I just change the (standard) Paragraph Quotations and the Character Quotation ones, the program behaves in the same way as above but my workaround does not preserve bold and italics.
(Now, this might be OT or maybe not.) An additional weird behaviour of the program is that if I move the cursor to the end of the newly formatted text and press Enter, the new paragraph I get is in Default Style (I set Next Style = Default in Organizer) but with Gentium 10 pt font (visible pressing CTRL-F10). If I press Enter again, without entering any text, the new paragraph is still Default Style and Gentium 10, but the previous one turns to URW Palladio 12 pt – provided I didn’t enter any text in it. Just so: the paragraph sign on the line above the cursor suddenly grows to 12 pts and its font switches to URWPalladio.
Maybe I’m just missing some basic feature of the way Writer handles styles and formatting; but I have searched the web for several days before posting this and I am a bit puzzled. Thanks to anyone who would help! – and many thanks to the people who have written Libreoffice.
EDIT:: mariosv’s suggestion of resetting the user profile works, so far as the question is concerned: font type and size are correctly applied to chunks of text typed in in Default Style. They are not consistently applied to chunks of text copied and pasted from other documents – but these might have been formatted or imported in so many different ways. The text I directly type as Default gets out right when I apply the new style and it mostly preserves italics etc. ‘Mostly’ because, if a whole paragraph is italicized, applying the new paragraph style turns it to normal (‘roman’). This seems to depend on the final ‘character’, the paragraph mark. I tried to italicize all the paragraph except the final paragraph mark. This can’t be done unless I add a space at the end of the paragraph. If I italicize the whole line except the final space (and paragraph mark) the italics are preserved. But they are also preserved if I italicize only the ending part of the paragraph (par. mark included). I guess this has to do with the way the program handles the paragraph mark (which might be a programmer’s nightmare). In MS Office, if I remember well, one can select a single par. mark and either format or delete it (by deleting it, the style of the following paragraph is applied). In Writer, one can do so only by selecting up to the following line (which makes it impossible to select the last par. mark in the document). If one deletes it, the style of the previous paragraph is applied. Ok, I am getting wildly offtopic. But I think it might be good (at least for debugging purposes) to have a view mode in which not merely not printing characters but also all the formatting tags are displayed. That might help people make more focussed suggestions for improvements. – Many thanks to mariosv and to oweng. I am sorry I cannot upvote mariosv’s answer because I don’t have points enough (as a contributor, I am quite new here).