Avoiding Direct Formatting

[Ridge Kennedy]

I want to use styles properly and as much as possible, per wisdom or Word
experts. I also know that Word does funky things when a user boldfaces or
italicizes a section of text in a paragraph that is formatted using styles,
creating a new StyleName + Bold in a list of styles.

So, in situations where a user wants to boldface a few words for emphasis or
italicize a title, what is best practice? Is there a way to avoiding direct
formatting of text in these situations?

Ridge (in New Joisey)

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

There is no reason for avoiding direct formatting in most such instances as
those you mention. In cases where the formatting has a particular meaning,
you may want to create a character style. This has two advantages:

1. If you later want to change the formatting of all the text to which this
style is applied, you need only modify the style. For example, in a
dictionary I'm creating, I want the defined terms to be Bold, C&lc, and
cross-references to be Small Caps, so I've defined character styles to apply
to these two elements. I happen to know that the publisher will change all
the defined terms to Bold, All Caps; the compositor (being an idiot) will
very likely do this manually, but at least I've *tried* to make it easy for
him.

2. In current versions of Word, Ctrl+Spacebar treats character styles the
same as any other direct formatting, but in Word 2007, it is possible to
remove direct font formatting while leaving formatting applied by character
styles.

 

[Charles Kenyon]

You can apply character styles if you want. In most templates the Strong
style is bold and the Emphasis style is italics. I've changed my Ctrl-B and
Ctrl-I shortcuts to implement those character styles (but left the toolbar
buttons alone in case I really do want direct formatting). To turn them off,
I use Ctrl-spacebar.
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide




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from my ignorance and your wisdom.

 

[Ridge Kennedy]

Thank you, ma'am.

Ridge