Custom style is inconsistent in different parts of the same document [character style applied]

English
#1

I’m using Libre Writer and facing a very frustrating bug. I made a custom style called Resume Experience Bullet. When I apply it to text, it usually works and makes it the correct 10pt font. However, just a little lower down in the document when I apply it, for some reason it is always 13pt font and gray instead of black. In another spot it insists on being 11pt. I have edited the style and overwritten it to try to force it to stay 10pt, but whenever I apply the style to the lower part of the document it instantly becomes 13 points.

I have even tried going to the lower document section, changing the font size to 10, then highlighting it and clicking Update Selected Style. Want to guess what this does? It makes it instantly change back to 13 point font.

Document is attached. It’s a resume but I deleted most of the content because it’s personally identifying. As you can see, in the first two sections of bullet points, the style is set to Resume Experience Bullet and correctly shows as 10pt font. However, in the lower section (starting with “Satisfied Customers”), it is 13pt even though it is also set to the same style. The line above that is 11pt.

It’s like there’s some invisible box around this area of the document that forces the font size to be 13 points or something, it doesn’t make any sense.

resume libre office style bug inconsistent.odt (18.0 KB)

Please fix this bug.

#2

Please add your bug reports at the official bug tracker. Contributors may not see your report here as this is a ask site (not a bug reporting site).

1 Like
#3

There is no bug here.
Select the text and clear direct formatting (Ctrl+M).
Check that there are character styles (i.e., Emphasis) applied to some parts of the text.
image

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#4

This did not fix the issue.

I selected the text, did Clear Direct Formatting, then once again set it to the style Resume Experience Bullet and it’s still set to 13pt instead of the correct 10pt.

I’ve attached the file which I saved after clearing the formatting. As you can see that bottom section is still set to 13pt font and still gray instead of black.

resume libre office style bug inconsistent after clearing direct formatting.odt (17.7 KB)

#9

In addition to @LeroyG ,

Getting started with professional text composition in Writer

And in it specifically:
Does the upper sting the lower?

#7

There is no bug: you applied character style Emphasis over the “offending” lines. You modified this style to request 13pt.

Apart from this, your document is an awful mess of a mixture of styling and direct formatting. I know that creating consistent list is quite difficult and one of the features hard to understand but you should avoid Format>Bullets & Numbering (or its equivalent toolbar buttons) as much as possible in favour of list styles. In this document you have both: the lower part uses list style WWNum14 pointing to character style ListLabel12 to format the bullet, unfortunately differently from what you did with Bullets & Numbering in the upper part.

I don’t understand why you use tables to create your headings (adding even direct formatting).

Globally, your document has been in contact with Word which has added its own idiosyncrasies (like the WWNum14 style) and probably saved as .docx in the past.

Please read the Writer Guide and learn how to use Writer. Remember the style precedence: paragraph style can be overridden by character style which in its turn is overridden by direct formatting. Be also aware that writing a document with direct formatting requires super-expert skill to get it right contrary to common belief.

PS: when posting here always mention OS name, LO version (and save format).

#15

The answer to most of your questions is that this document started as a resume template that was created by someone else in MS Word, but I don’t know how this would have set those lines to a character style because as far as I know that feature doesn’t exist in Word.

So then the question remains, how did those lines get set to the Emphasis character style when I didn’t even know that character styles existed before making this post? There is apparently no built-in key combination I could have accidentally pressed, and the only other way to set them is to open the character styles menu which I didn’t do before (at least not intentionally).

#5

Actually, this is indeed no bug. I found the time to investigate further and here’s how to solve this:

  1. Download the first file you provided (resume libre office style bug inconsistent.odt) and open it. Your bottom area looks like this:

    lo_before
    lo_before1094×261 46.3 KB

  2. Select all, right click. Choose “clear direct formatting”. Now it looks like this:

    lo_direct_cleared
    lo_direct_cleared1091×290 50 KB

  3. If you select the text and go to the paragraph styles you see that all is set to “Resume experience bullet”:

    lo_para_style
    lo_para_style1654×640 143 KB

  4. But the color and text size don’t match right? That’s because character styles are applied (the one named “Emphasis”):

    lo_charac_style
    lo_charac_style1656×637 133 KB

  5. Choose “No character style” and color as well as text size revert to the values defined in the paragraph style:

    lo_fixed
    lo_fixed1659×512 115 KB

Probably should have taken more time to investigate instead of redirecting you to the bugtracker… sorry about that.

Tested with LO 7.4.7.2 on Debian 11 with GNOME DE (3.38.5).

Edit: Oh well… Turns out I cannot read too. @LeroyG wrote exactly that:

#6

I see now, thanks for the in-depth explanation.

There’s still an issue though. How did this text get set to the Emphasis character style in the first place?

I didn’t set this or any other part of the document to a character style. I didn’t even know they existed until just now. Is there some key combination that sets stuff to some character style that I accidentally pressed?

Honestly I don’t really see the point of them, they seem over-complicated. Can’t you do everything that character styles can do with just another normal style?

#8

Character styles never get set automatically. They are applied by the user. There is no keyboard shortcut to activate them (and this is probably an error).

Character styles allow you to apply a consistently repeated formatting different from the one in effect in the paragraph. For instance, Emphasis changes words to italics (i.e. when this style are not modified as in the case of your document). This is much better than using Ctrl+I because you can chance the italicising for bolding if you prefer: just change the character style and all italic words change for bold without the need to track all occurrences manually.

This is not “over-complicated”. On the contrary it is very handy as soon as you accept the idea (it is not present in Word). Then direct formatting really is “over-complicated” because all “embellishments” are original single-use occurrences which must be handled individually.

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#10

They can be linked to keystrokes in 7.6.1.2, but none are by default.

1 Like
#11

You can do this in any LO version. I use this feature heavily to avoid leaving the keyboard for the mouse and back. I just didn’t want to make the comment too long with a digression.

#12

Yeah but my point is that we don’t need paragraph styles and character styles to be different things. As far as I can tell, paragraph styles are just a weaker version of character styles because they can’t be set to individual words or characters, and they can’t capture things like italic or bold. Why not only have one “style” and have it be able to be applied to individual words or characters, and have it capture bold and italic etc. then we don’t need these confusing two separate types of styles.

The other issue I take with them is that a style defines how something looks so it doesn’t make sense to say that one word can be two styles at the same time.Yet, the existence of both paragraph and character styles means words or letters can be set to two styles at the same time. It’s like saying something is red and blue at the same time. It’s confusing and counter-intuitive because it doesn’t really make sense.

#13

You need to study the subject in-depth to see that having several kinds of styles that can overrule each other makes all the sense in the world.

#14

Could you please explain why having one word set to multiple styles (but only one of them is actually the real style its set to) makes sense?

#16

Please skip the arrogance. You are learning something here.

Styles are “bags” of formatting information that you can apply with one action, as opposed to what’s called manual or direct formatting, which is done one by one.
A paragraph style sets all formatting for an entire paragraph. You can change the paragraph style for one or more paragraphs by selecting parts of them or just putting the cursor in a single one, and assign the style. Sometimes you want individual words or even letters to be in a different font or size, like superscript or subscript. For such things, you use a character style. It overrides the settings in the paragraph style, but only for the selected text. Footnote and endnote anchors are formatted using character styles. If you want to change the font or size for them, you only have to change the character style. But yes, that may be hard to grasp at first.

#17

There’s no arrogance going on here, I just asked for you to explain because I’m trying to understand better. If you’re reading arrogance from my words then you are misinterpreting them.

Yes I understand that character styles can be used to style individual words (and they capture things like bold and italic) and I agree that is useful. In that case then it seems that paragraph styles are not really necessary since they just do the same thing as character styles but with less functionality, no?

Say we made a version of Writer where paragraph styles were deleted and only character styles remained. You could still achieve the same functionality. You could select the whole paragraph and set it to a “Normal” style. Then to emphasize certain words you could set those words to a “Emphasized” style. Now you have achieved the goal of having most of the text set with one style but a few words given special effects using another style, and we don’t have a situation where any words are set to two styles at the same time. Any word or character is either “Normal” or “Emphasized”. Now just rename character styles to just styles and I think you can get a picture of what I am saying

#18

Saying that something doesn’t make sense is not considered as polite by everybody, because it can mean several things, including: this is nonsense. It is better to say that you don’t understand it. Will be afk for a bit.

1 Like
#19

Well my intention is certainly not to be rude but I am trying to be clear and direct and I’m sorry if that comes off as rude

#20

Paragraph styles and character styles address different aspects of publishing.

A paragraph is an area within a flow. This area has mainly geometric properties:

  • how far is it indented relative to page margins?
  • what are the spaces above and below separating it from other paragraphs?
  • what is behaviour relative to page ? (does it cause a page break? does it reset page number? does it causes other higher level changes, e.g. in page layout?)
  • how is this area decorated (border, background)?
  • how does it constraint text? (alignment, tab stops, hyphenation, text blocking, widow/orphan control, numbering, …)


A character style describe the aspect individual characters:

  • font (face, size, weight, …)
  • colour and background
  • case transformation
  • borders (on individual characters; this is in addition to paragraph borders)

As a courtesy, a paragraph style contains an implicit character style. This avoids the pain to define explicitly a paragraph style to be associated with a paragraph style.

The real added value in having both paragraph and character style is in the possible override of the implicit character style by another one. You just revert to the implicit one by requesting the cancellation of the applied character style. If you only had character styles, you’d have to explicitly return to the desired one (replacing the implicit one). And this goes even farther. It is possible to apply several character styles to combine their effects (in an orderly manner), but this becomes quickly very tricky.

But when you write paragraph styles are useless, have you taken into account the geometric settings they allow, settings which are not available in character styles. Paragraph styles are not “weaker” versions of character styles. They are different.

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