Paragraph Style - Category "Custom" vs "Text"

[brianjheisler]

I’m doing a deep-dive on styles and while most of it makes sense, the category settings in the organizer tab have me confused. I’ve looked everywhere - here, various forums, the Writer Guide (7.5), and even AI chat - but have found nothing that can tell me what the difference between these category settings is in terms of how they impact formatting. Are these categories nothing more than an organizational aide for the author?

(Background: Having only a cursory understanding of styles on a large project previously led to disaster. I’m attempting to become better educated on this subject now in order to avoid the same problem on my current project.)

[Hrbrgr]

Paragraph styles are dependent on the “Default” paragraph style.
All other paragraph styles have first inherited everything from this Default, to be adjusted then.

Professional text composition with Writer

---

English documentation

[ajlittoz]

I assume you’re talking about the drop-down menu at the bottom of the style sidepane.

As you guessed, this is only a “filter” to decrease clutter in the list.

• All Styles is the default unsorted list (not user-friendly but sometimes useful to delete unused or “pollution” styles
• Hierarchical is IMHO the most useful display for advanced style users as it clearly shows the dependencies between styles
• Applied Styles shows only the effectively used styles in the document
  This list starts empty (more exactly with Default Paragraph Style or Default Page Style for paragraphs and pages because this reflects the setting for the default initial paragraph) and is progressively populated when your document is written. It is most useful when you edit an (already large) existing document constrained by some in-house graphics charter and all useful styles are already used (no need to apply some fancy new style).
• The other categories tend to target some editorial or configuration tasks to present a limited number of styles to minimise the risk of errors.
  • Custom Styles: those you have created (do not include modified built-in styles)
  • Hidden Styles: those you have voluntarily hidden so that you can unhide them
  • Text Styles: the most common ones to write a document (main text + outline)
  • Chapter Styles: IMHO ill-named because they are related to titling (Title, Subtitle, Appendix)
  • List Styles: those intended to format list items (need some explanation to understand how they differ and their use case)
  • Index Styles: those for TOC, indexes, bibliography and other table of …
  • Special Styles: those not otherwise categorised like captions, header and footer, table contents, letter-specific
  • HTML Styles: not really for HTML; those are found under other categories but as collected here again for their equivalence to common HTML directives
  • Conditional Styles: lists the styles configured as conditional
    This is an advanced feature making a style context-sensitive. Once configured you can’t revert this style to “normal”. I recommend not to use it as there are much better user-controllable ways to do it.
  • Automatic: I don’ know what this category stands for.

This display filter doesn’t change any property in any style. It is only a convenience to prevent confusion.

[brianjheisler]

I assume you’re talking about the drop-down menu at the bottom of the style sidepane.

No, although I understand that once I SET a category, I can then filter it (as you explained) there.

I was referencing the category settings in the organizer tab where the “category” can (sometimes) be changed. (In the style side-pane, right-click on a manually created style and select Modify. When the Paragraph Style dialog box appears, select the Organizer Tab and, in the Style section of that pane there is a Category Drop-Down List.)

As you guessed […etc]

Nonetheless, I infer from your response that these are merely editorial aides with no direct impact on formatting.

Thanks!

[ajlittoz]

In the Organizer tab, the category only associates the styles with one of the filtered lists in the style side pane. No other effect, notably no effect on formatting. As you say, just an editorial aide.

[Hrbrgr]

In addition to @ajlittoz