Operation Manual

86 | Working with Text
Using text styles
It's a good idea to establish the main text and graphic formatting to be used in
your site early in the creative process. WebPlus facilitates this by letting you
define named text styles. A text style is a set of character and/or paragraph
attributes saved as a group. When you apply a style to text, you apply the
whole group of attributes in just one step. For example, you could define
named paragraph styles for particular layout elements, such as "Heading,"
"Sidebar," or "Body Text," and character styles to convey meaning, such as
"Emphasis," "Price," or "Date Reference." Using styles not only speeds the
task of laying out a site but ensures consistency and ease of updating.
Paragraph styles and character styles
A paragraph style is a complete specification for the appearance of a
paragraph, including all its font and paragraph format attributes. Every
paragraph in WebPlus has a paragraph style associated with it.
• WebPlus includes one built-in paragraph style called "Normal" with a
specification consisting of generic attributes including left-aligned, 12pt
Times New Roman. Initially, the "Normal" style is the default for any
new paragraph text you type. You can modify the "Normal" style by
redefining any of its attributes, and create any number of new styles
having different names and attributes.
• Applying a paragraph style to text updates all the text in the paragraph
except sections that have been locally formatted. For example, a single
word marked as bold would remain bold when the paragraph style was
updated.
A character style includes only font attributes (such as font name, point size,
bold, italic, etc.), and you apply it at the character level—that is, to a range of
selected characters—rather than to the whole paragraph.
• Typically, a character style applies emphasis (such as italics, bolding or
colour) to whatever underlying font the paragraph already uses; the
assumption is that you want to keep that underlying font the same. That's
why WebPlus includes a built-in character style with the name "Default
Paragraph Font," which has no specified attributes but basically means
"whatever font the paragraph style already uses." Suppose a paragraph
uses a style called "Body," and the "Body" style uses regular 10pt Arial.
Then the "Default Paragraph Font" style for that particular paragraph
means regular 10pt Arial.