Writer Guide

Migrating to character styles
For people accustomed to formatting text manually, character styles
can take some getting used to. Here are some suggestions for making
the transition easier:
• Never mix character styles and manual formatting. Manual
formatting supersedes character styles. If you combine them, you
may end up wasting hours in frustration trying to figure out why
your character styles don’t work.
• Right-clicking and choosing Default Formatting removes any
text formatting (both manual and character styles).
• Realize that clicking the Bold icon in the toolbar is not easier
than double-clicking on a character style that is preset for bolding
the font typeface.
• Leave the Styles and Formatting window open to make character
styles easy to access.
Working with frame styles
Frames are often used as containers for text or graphics. To provide
consistency in the appearance of frames used for similar purposes, it is
a good idea to define styles for frames. For example, you might want
photographs to be enclosed in a frame with a drop-shadowed border,
line drawings in a frame with a plain border, marginal notes in a frame
without a border but with a shaded background, and so on.
Writer provides several predefined frame styles, which you can modify
as needed; and you can define new frame styles. The technique for
defining and applying frame styles is similar to that for other styles.
Tip
There is considerable overlap between the uses of frames and
of sections for some page layout purposes. You may find it
useful to take a look at Chapter 4 (Formatting Pages) for
information about the use of frames and sections.
How frame styles work
When an object is added to Writer, it is automatically enclosed in a
frame of a predetermined type. The frame sets how the object is placed
on the page, as well as how it interacts with other elements in the
document. You can edit the frame by modifying the frame style it uses
or by using a manual override when a frame is added to the document.
246 OpenOffice.org 3.x Writer Guide
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