If you hope to discover usage of styles through their visual appearance, you’re on the wrong track.
I don’t know your background relative to document processing, desktop publishing or other typographical activity.
Writer basic principles encourage to use styles as semantic markup on your text, no matter how the text presently looks. In other words, as an author, you don’t care how the book (article, paper, note, …) looks in the end; you try to describe your personal meaning with styles.
Styles are grouped in “families”. You can have an idea about these families by selecting Hierarchical from the menu at bottom of the style sidepane.
Paragraph styles are the most organised out-of-the-box. When nothing is expanded, you only have Default Paragraph Style which is the ancestor of all others. Never use this style for any text. Since it is at the root of the hierarchy, its role is to set default parameters which will be forwarded to all others (you can override parameters lower in the tree to stop propagation; the overriding point becomes a sub-root). This is very handy to change in a snap an important parameter, like font face, to see the whole document change instantly.
Expanding once reveals the “families” (styles having children). Those without children, like Addressee, Complimentary Close, Sender, Signature, are clearly targeted for simple letters. Let’s look at some “families”:
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Body Text
This is the “normal” style for your text related to your main topic. Children of Body Text target more specific usages like List.
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Header & Footer, a sub-root, don’t use it
Children are used in footers and headers.
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Heading, a sub-root, don’t use it
Children are intended for all headings: book title and sub-title, chapter, sub-chapter, etc. up to level 10.
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Index, a sub-root, don’t use it
Children target table of contents, table of figures, table of … and alphabetical index.
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Table Contents for text inside tables
Table headings are styled with its child Table Heading
Your task, as an author, is to annotate your text with styles so that Writer understands the structure of it (mainly the difference between discourse and headings, sometimes called “sub-titles”). What you’d want is to give every distinct significance a dedicated style. In a “normal” document, you rarely have more than 10 significances. If you already have more than 30, probably you need more introspection about your text to abstract it better.
What I wrote for paragraph styles is also valid for character styles. Don’t neglect them. Word has no notion for them and forces us to use direct formatting to enhance words. In Writer, character styles describe a meaning different from the current paragraph. You can add Emphasis or Strong Emphasis on words. Note that emphasis can be represented many ways. By default Emphasis is italic but you perhaps prefer something else. The important point here is to avoid naming your emphasis “Italic” because
- many different significances end up italic in traditional typography, e.g. emphasis, foreign word, quotation, …
If your style name describes the visual effect, you won’t be able to act separately on emphasis and foreign words.
- this turns your name irrelevant if you decide to reconfigure your “italic” style to regular + red.
Rather few built-in character styles are really “general purpose”: Emphasis, Quotation, Strong Emphasis. All others cover rather technical Writer usage (like formatting a note reference number). In general, you’ll add custom character styles to cover your specific significances. Once again, you don’t need more than 10.
Character styles can also be organised hierarchically (in families).
Page styles have rather straightforward names. Default Page Style is the main page style. First Page is somewhat a misnomer; Something like “Cover Page” would probably have been better, but you get the idea: it is the style for the very first page. Left Page and Right Page are buddy styles (which automatically alternate) when you need facing pages with slightly different geometries. The others occur in special “technical” contexts.
Frequently, you’ll add your own page styles, one set per logical part of your book. Once again if you end up with a need of more than 15 styles, think twice about the possibility of “variable” page styles: styles which receive information from typography or document “variables” and are capable to adapt to various contexts.
Page styles can’t be organised hierarchically and this has been requested as an enhancement.
Consider the typography configuration (or visual aspect) of built-in styles as an example of what can be done. I’d say this is a demo and does does not satisfy any real user’s needs (because it is too generic). Use them for their semantic markup value, add custom styles for your missing significances and configure all of them for your preferred graphics chart.
AND ONE LAST GOLDEN RULE: never, never, never use direct formatting when a style can do the job. Contrary to common belief, direct formatting is not “intuitive” at all. Formatting nicely a document with direct formatting requires super-expert-guru skills to do it properly and quickly. Formatting with styles gives you a tremendous power and guarantees reliability and ease of maintenance. Direct formatting is an open door to formatting nightmare.
