I’m giving some style to some debating notes that a friend shared with me but sometimes I find this: when I select the text and the format into Text body (“Cuerpo de texto” in Spanish), it’s just partially modified. Some of the text keeps its previous format: Corbel font (12 pts) instead of Liberation Sans (11pts).
I’ll leave some screenshots below and a demo ODT file attached.
I’m using LO 7.0.3.1 on GNU/Linux.
Writer offers several style categories. These categories are like layers of tracing paper over your text. The deepest layer is paragraph style, then character style to change locally the attributes and over everything direct formatting.
Upper layers override and hide formatting by lower layers.
In your sample file, the third paragraph has received direct formatting for Corbel 12pt. When you style this paragraph with Text Body (or any other paragraph style), you change the paragraph layer and do not affect in any way the character or direct formatting layer. Consequently, the direct formatting is still in effect.
Remove direct formatting by selecting text where you suspect there is some and Ctrl+M. This clears direct formatting, making the layer “fully transparent”.
As a general rule, avoid direct formatting and format your text exclusively with styles (paragraph and character). Don’t mix styling and direct formatting otherwise you’ll enter formatting hell.
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I see, thank you so much!! That was perfectly explained. I imagine there is no way to do that without removing the bold words, right? maybe I could create some character style that looks exactly like the text body with bold words and change them into it before clearing the text (although this seems terribly tedious in this almost 200 pages document).
Character styles are used to emphasise words inside a paragraph which format is “globally” defined by a paragraph style.
The common erroneous way how to draw reader attention is to think in terms of “bold” or “italics”. As an author, you qualify some words as “important”, “ironical”, “mandatory”, … You translate this meaning with typographical attributes (weight, angle, font face, colour, …). Note that due to the limited number of attributes, several semantic qualifications may end up with the same appearance.
Among built-in character styles, you have Emphasis and Strong Emphasis which are usually rendered as italics and bold respectively. Use them to mark your words.
The task may look tedious because you didn’t use styles from the start, notably the underestimated character ones because M$ Word has no notion of them. Styling a doc consistently allows to drastically change its appearance through styles without editing text at all.
I see, thank you so much for such complete explanation! I was asking before noticing your new comment if there is a way to automatically exchange the formats (from direct to strong empathise or any other). I think this would do this incredibly tedious work way much easier.
I mean, I found about replacing direct format with the searching tool, but nothing that connects character or paragraph styles with direct format
You can’t replace direct-formatting with some character style with Search & Replace or other tool. From S&R point of view, the attributes set by the different layers are indistinguishable: it can’t tell if bold is part of paragraph style or direct formatting. Therefore: manual job.
But you do it only once. After that, edit only with styles. The hardest part is not to restyle but to design the adequate set of styles.
I see, thanks!
