Works for me in LO 7.5.3.2 under Fedora 38.
Note that inheritance is rather tricky. There is a shortcoming in the style configuration dialog: it can’t visually show “transparent” state of any attribute, i.e. when the attribute gets its value from the parent style. Don’t trust a value identical to the parent: if you ever modified the parameter then explicitly set it to the same vamue as in the parent, it is still an override. When you change the value in the parent, the override will prevent any change.
The only way to revert to “transparent” (=inherit) state is to press Reset to Parent. This flushes all attributes in the tab. Consequently you have to force again those which were intentionally changed.
From my experience with styling, if you need so many styles, you have not abstracted enough the structure of your document. With complex documents, you should make do with ~20 paragraph styles, 10-20 character styles, less than 5 frame styles, perhaps 2 list styles. The number of pages styles is harder to estimate because in the most complex case, you need 3 styles (first, left and right) per part. My sophisticated documents use ~15 but this is not an issue because most of them are automatically applied as parameters in Text Flow properties of paragraph styles.
The best approach to styling is semantic styling. Styles don’t designate the visual effects you expect (“artistic approach” leading to excessive number of styles) but are meta-annotations in the text. Style names reflects author’s significance of paragraphs, words, … or their importance in the development of the argumentation. There are not hundreds of different semantic values in any text. If you have 10, this is already a difficult text to understand from a linguistic point of view. Of course, you need to duplicate these values in paragraph and character styles because a word in a paragraph may stand out of its context (different expressiveness of the word compared to the paragraph).
As an example of this meta-annotation, take headings. They are traditionally styled Heading n which don’t tell anything about font face, size, spacing. The paragraph is just flagged as part of the document outline which will allow to do “interesting” things with these paragraphs, such as collecting them in a TOC.
Of course, I don’t count the Heading n family in the 10 semantic values I mentioned above, otherwise I must double the figure.
Once you have defined your semantics-driven styles, you give them distinctive typographical attributes so that you hint the reader about author’s message.
Take inspiration on built-in styles: their names suggest usage:
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Heading n for outline, Title and Subtitle
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Text Body for discourse
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Numbering n for numbered lists (need customisation)
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Header and Footer
- Footnotes
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Emphasis and Strong Emphasis usually italic and bold respectively
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Definition, Example
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First Page for cover page
Except perhaps for Landscape, they never allude to their visual settings. They already define an intent.
The advantage of the semantic approach is to allow to change in a single operation the appearance of all “objects” belonging to the same semantic class.
