Creating a new style out of selection changes the appearance of the selection

[andybay]

I’m trying to learn how to use the styles feature in LibreOffice Writer.

I’m having serious difficulties in understanding how it should work.

This is what I’m doing:
I’m selecting some text, removing it’s bold-property, setting it’s font-size and changing it’s font color. The I go to “Style” → “New Style from Selection” and give it a name.

What happens:
The selected text changes in a really unexpected way: It becomes bold again and the color of it changes.

What I would expect to happen:
A new style is created that looks like the selected text I used to create the style.

What could I be doing wrong here?

[Hrbrgr]

New Style from selection

See Note in the Link:
Only the manually formatted text properties at the cursor position in the document
are added to the style selected in the styles.
Other properties used as part of the Styles are not added to the updated Style.
For paragraph Styles, the manual format must be present in the whole paragraph.

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Online-Help:

Creating New Styles From Selections

You can also access the help directly from LibreOffice.
Use the Help menu.
Help is your friend.

[andybay]

Thank you for helping!

So is there a fool proof worflow for making sure that I create a new style that makes text look exactly like the selected text the style was created from?

[Hrbrgr]

Well, you must comply with the specified conditions.
If you use this procedure only rarely,
you then should perhaps do without it and set up styles according @ajlittoz 's answer.

[ajlittoz]

I have always been very dubious about the “from selection” tools because of the not-well-documented conditions on this approach.

IMHO, the only reliable method of defining a style is to use the creation dialog. Everything is very rigorously under control. There is no bad interference with any added direct formatting.

In addition, you can base a style on another one so that it inherits initially its attributes from the original style. You only set the attributes which must be different. The “untouched” attributes are in a “transparent state” so that their value is the one in the original style. When you modify the original style, these “transparent attributes” are automatically adjusted to the original.

[Lupp]

@andybay

I go to “Style” → “New Style from Selection

You already got good answers. However both of them didn’t mention (or ask for) the style family supposed to be the one you want to create a new instance in.

I would assume you had paragraph styles in mind because this is the default family (leftmost icon) for the ‘Styles’ window. Nonetheless the details you mentioned referred to character properties.

In fact paragraph styles define a complete set of character propertties without bundling them to a character style (what might be more appropriate in principle but look less “handy”.for many users).

Anyway you need to distinguish the two style families for paragraphs and for characters, and in addition to consider overlaid direct formatting. The underlying inherited style will always be passed to the newly created style whether it was dominant for the appearance of selected text at the time of the creation of the new style “from selection” or not. This always can lead to counterintuitive effects as @ajlittoz hinted. Follow his advice and define styles explicitly via the dialogs instead of using the “from selevtion”. .