Bold “attribute” is in fact a variant of the font face. So, you don’t request the application of an attribute, but you give some guidance to Writer to choose between several variants.
Matter is somehow complicated because “bold” is not a mere binary attribute. Many professional fonts provide a continuum of “grease” thickness. I think in particular of Univers. In addition, font designer don’t always name this “attribute” bold and may give it a different name like Heavy.
Anyway, in the Font tab of the character style, you must force Regular in the configuration. And this is where things go awry. When you create you character style, font face is inherited from Tools>Options, LibreOffice Writer>Basic Fonts (Western), but is “ineffective” until you really select one (this is a “transparent” state valid for any font active at the moment you apply the character style). Similarly, “Style” is displayed as Regular but is also in “transparent” state.
The “standard” way to force a parameter is to act on it. To make sure, you’d select a value like Italic, save the style, then modify it to Regular to make sure the forced value is taken into account.
But, unfortunately, for a reson unknow to myself, choosing Regular seems to be equivalent to pressing Reset to Parent. IMHO this is bug.
However I found a workaround:
- create your style with
Italic Style so that it is not empty (this seems to be the key factor)
- reopen your style to modify it
- select
Regular from the Style
- press Apply (take care your cursor is located in a “safe” area or the selected text is the one to receive the styling)
However, from repeated trials, not sure this is really necessary
- press now OK
The Organizer tab now shows your style definition as “Not xxx+normal” where xxx is the “attribute” you set in the first step.
I think this bad behaviour began when italic and bold were no longer treated as binary attributes and transferred to font variants.
Here LO 7.5.2.2, Fedora 38.
EDIT:
Bug report tdf#155113
