Can a style become font-neutral?

[F A L]

I am tryging to define my styles so to make them easy to modify. In
particular, I would like to remove all font type definitions from all styles
but for the normal style (for paragraphs styles) and the default paragraph
font for character styles (I am using a Spanish version of word so I don't
have the English name of this style). Then I can define all other styles as
deviations of these tweo styles and that would make it easier for me to
change the font of all styles. THe problem is that before realising that this
was a sensible thing to do I selected specific font for other styles, such as
Heading 1 and Body tex etc, and I haven't figured out a way to remove such
definitions for these styles. If i go to the "modifyt style" tab and clik on
"font" and simply delete the name of the font (e.g. Adobe Garamond Pro) and
then click OK, the style remains unmodified. It seems that I can only change
the font by selecting other font. Is there any way to make a style
font-neutral? (apart, of course, of deleting the style and creating it anew,
which apparently cannot be done with in-built styles anyway).

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

I believe that if you set the font of the child style to the same font
currently defined in the parent style (the style set as "based on), that it
will wipe out the additional font definition, and next time you change the
parent style, the child style will pick up the correct font. (just had to
mess around with that the other day, in fact...)

However, I'm not sure that redefining all your styles like that is the most
efficient way, though obviously it depends on your workflow...

It may be better to instead set up custom templates for specific projects.
More info:
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart1.htm

I'm a tad superstitious here, but for anything worth putting that much
effort into, I just avoid Normal so that I don't have to worry about
unintended cascading effects. For my major project, I used a custom
template, and created a BaseFont style, which I never applied to any text,
but based all the styles used in the custom template on, so that I didn't
have to worry about the double-space in my MainText style cascading to my
BlockQuote style. That worked very well, but I'm not sure you'd want to do
it with Normal style.

DM

 

[F A L]

Dear Daiya, Thanks for your tip; it worked! You are of course right in
warning me about relying on Normal; FOr my part I deeply distrust it!
Anyway, regarding character styles I have now a related but different
problem: by default all char styles are based upon "Fuente de párrafo
determinado", which is Spanish for (something like) "Default paragraph font".
This style cannot be modified: The option "edit" (or whatever it is in the
English version) is dimmed when this particular style is selected. In turn,
this char style seems to be based on a non existing style, "Parrafo
subrayado" (underlined paragraph: the definition of this style says: "Fuente
del estilo de párrafo subrayado +", i.e. "Underlined paragraph style font").
Of course I could base other char styles on other char styles, but it is
annoying not knowing what is going on: are there styles that are *so*
in-built that cannot be modified? The what is the point of such styles?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Glad that worked.

I'm not totally clear on your second question--are you saying you want to be
able to define the Default Paragraph Font (DPF) to be a certain font?
Right, I can't modify my definition there either--but what my description
says is "the font of the underlying paragraph style +" which perhaps makes
it a little more clear that you can't set the font for DPF because it picks
up the font from the paragraph style. So that if you have character styles
defined as DPF + italic or DPF + red, when you change the font for the
paragraph's style, they will change as well. So I think if you leave all
your character styles as DPF + then they will pick up changes to your base
font. In fact, I think that means you don't need to bother basing character
styles on other character styles, just leave them all based on DPF as is the
default, and you will never have to change them manually, changing the para
style will take care of it.

However, I believe I recall Suzanne Barnhill and perhaps Cindy Meister
having an expert-level discussion of some of the strange characteristics of
the DPF, perhaps Suzanne will chime in.

Aha! Just figured out the confusion between "underlying" and "underlined."

Hope that helps,
Daiya

PS. Just in case it matters--it is Default Paragraph Font in the English
version, but one clicks Modify to change the style.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

To clarify a little, the Default Paragraph Font is not a specific font; it
is the font that is defined for a particular paragraph style. If you create
a character style, it will be defined as the Default Paragraph Font plus
whatever characteristics you have given the character style, meaning that
those characteristics (bold, italic, a specific font, or whatever) will be
applied to the font of the paragraph. For more on this, see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/DefParaFont.htm

 

[F A L]

Thengis are clearer now: For the Spanish version of word they translated
"underlying paragraph style" as "underlined paragraph style". Suzzane's link
proved very useful. Thanks!
Fernando