I am really stuck on this one, because what I see happening runs entirely opposite to what I EXPECT to happen.
The way I understand styles in LO, is that it’s sort of like a game of rock-paper-scissors:
Paragraph styles take precedence over manually applied formatting
Character styles take precedence over paragraph styles.
So, for example, if I were to use the “italic” button on the toolbar for some text, then applied a paragraph style that was set to default to Liberation Serif with a font weight of “Regular,” the “regular” weight would overwrite the manually applied italic style.
If, on the other hand, I were to apply the emphasis character style to a block of text, and then applied the paragraph style set to Liberation Serif with a font weight of “Regular,” the emphasis style would be preserved, because character styles are favored over paragraph styles.
That’s the way I understand it to work. Am I wrong? Because this is what’s happening:
Consider this block of text, which I’ve taken from the document I’m trying to format:
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Jenny glowers, torn between a desire to help and the thought that there might not be much she can do. “Try not to get killed,” she says, then runs to the spare room. A moment later he hears wood squeaking against wood, then hears the sound of rain through the open spare room window. He walks over to his door and starts unlocking the deadbolts, one by one.
Try to give her five minutes. Try to give her at least five minutes.
The last deadbolt slides open. CB takes a shuddering breath, opens the door, and steps into the hall.
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You’ll note the middle paragraph is completely italicized. That happens rather a lot in this series.
So I copy the text from its original manuscript and paste it into a new document, based on a template with some custom paragraph and character styles. The first thing I do is search for every instance of italicized text and replace it with the “emphasis” character style (I do this with the Alternative Find & Replace for Writer plugin, which makes it a fairly simple task).
Then I select all the text and apply a paragraph style, which sets the proper indentation and line spacing.
It also strips away the italics in the center line of the example above, even though I have specifically checked to make sure that it is using the emphasis character style.
Why is it doing this? I notice the paragraph style I’m using defaults to Liberation Serif, 12pt, Regular weight, and that there is no way to actually remove the “weight” type from the style. That shouldn’t be a problem, though: it should recognize and preserve the character style, shouldn’t it? Is it ignoring the emphasis character style simply because the entire paragraph is using it? If so, how I can I ensure that this particular formatting convention–which is used rather a lot in the documents I am currently working on–is preserved?
Thank you in advance for any help you can provide to this vexing problem. 