Hi
Would an expert explain to me what is better and why?
Sincerely, Klaus
You should never use “Default Style” directly. It is the base in the style hierarchy. Its only purpose is, to make settings, which are common to most of the other styles. For example, you set the language of the text here and the body type. All really used paragraph styles are directly or indirectly based on it.
The style “Text Body” is the right one for the body and “Heading 1”, “Heading 2” for the headings. That does not mean, that you should use them as they are. You need to adapt them to your needs. For example, if you want to use “register true” you need to adjust the line spacing and the margins in “Text Body”.
It is good practice to choose a paragraph style based on the kind of content of the paragraph, e.g. assign “Text Body” to the normal text, but “Quotations” to a block quote. Such method makes review and reformatting of texts much easier.
A substance of paragraph styles is the fact, that they are hierarchical. You should set a property only, when it always differs from its parent. For example, if you decide, that 10pt might be to small for the aged readers of you newsletter, you will change it in the style “Default Style” and all others styles will adapt accordingly, so long as you have defined the hierarchy properly.
Thank you, Regina. I think I understand what your wrote.
In the default document template of a fresh LO-user the default paragraph format for text is “default”, but a heading is following by “text body” and also ctr 0 is applying “text body”.
Thus when I make a new odt and type in some text I would need to change it “text body”?
Yes. Change the style before you write the text.
Makes sense.
I just wonder why by default (automatically) it is not formatted as text body from the starting of a new document?
In case you use a Writer document as scratch pad, it makes no difference. For all other, serious use cases, you should start with a document template, which hopefully makes it right. Or you likely start your document with a heading and the next paragraph will have “text body” style automatically. It is an ongoing task for the UX team to find better defaults in all LibreOffice parts. Those enhancement requests are discussed in the LibreOffice Bugzilla.
Thank you.
Another interesting page on the subject:
https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Writer_for_Students/Text_Body