Two Paragraph style questions

[Ken_moorhead]

There are two questions here and I can split this post into two if necessary.

But, first things first. Here are the versions currently in play:

OL: 7.4.2.3
Mac OS: 10.13.6

I am working on style inheritances and have a question.

I noticed that if you change a parent style’s font, it changes the children.

Fair enough. I see where that would be useful.

However, in my case, I would like SOME children to inherit and some not to. Is that possible?

By way of explanation, my default paragraph style had gobs of children. They only attribute I want to propagate, really, is font size so that the children resize to the relative to the parent.

However, some children have children. Among these I would like the fonts to propagate should I decide to change them. This mostly applies to styles that exist to dispense with direct formatting like Text Message and Text Message Right, (Text Message being the parent there) where they are identical save the alignment.

Is this possible, or do I just have to edit carefully?

Side note: To me it would be helpful to allow the use to decide attribute by attribute what is inherited from the parent. That said, I realize there might be a whole host of reasons that is not, or can not be done.

The other question is simple. For a few paragraph styles, mostly title pages, I would like the font size to scale according to page size. So the font would be X on 8.5 x 11 paper and X-n, or n% of X on 6 x 9 paper. That way I can change the page size and not have to tinker with some of paragraph styles. Can that be done?

TIA;
Ken

[Ken_moorhead]

I think the answer to the font question was part of another answer I recieved, but I have to try it to be sure. Feel free to tell me I got it wrong, but…

• If I want the fonts to follow the parent, not NOT touch the font attribute.
• If I want the fonts to ignore the parent, DO touch the font attribute

As they stand now I will have to use [Reset to Parent] and rebuild then since I’ve mucked with them to many times.

Do I have that right?

TIA;
Ken

[ajlittoz]

Inheritance is structured like a tree. To give you an idea how built-in styles are related, display the style side pane as Hierarchical (bottom menu in the pane).

Styles cannot be organised as a mesh, i.e. a style can have only one parent.

The mechanism has been described as an answer in your other question.

It is up to you to create intermediate “sub-roots” to group your styles into “families”, just like Heading is the head of all Heading n. Any style inherit from upper but can override attributes. These overridden attributes will be passed downward, thus breaking locally inheritance from upper.

Paragraph and page styles live in different name spaces. They are independent from each other. Consequently, you can’t design a paragraph/character style font size depending on a parameter in a page style.

However, you can create a “working style” to set font size only and derive the effective styles from this intermediate one.

For example, assuming you want to make headings depending on page size, you can set the font size in built-in Heading and all Heading n will be set accordingly because their font size is defined in %-units.

The same trick can be used for title page. The common styles there are built-in Title and Subtitle which are under Heading. If you want to make them independent of Heading, at least size-wise, create a new node under Heading (or under Default Paragraph Style according to the attributes you want to override) and rebase the aforementioned styles by dragging and dropping them over the new sub-root.