• Problem with Styles (Word 2003 – all patches)

    Home » Forums » AskWoody support » Productivity software by function » MS Word and word processing help » Problem with Styles (Word 2003 – all patches)

    Author
    Topic
    WSDennis Hartley
    AskWoody Lounger
    September 13, 2006 at 2:32 pm #435304

    I have always assumed that when a style was applied to a paragraph any underling formatting – i.e. Bold, Italics etc – remains untouched.
    The attached example of two bibliographic entries hopefully show the problem I

    Reply | Quote
    Viewing 0 reply threads
    Author
    Replies
    • WSHansV
      AskWoody Lounger
      September 13, 2006 at 3:21 pm #1028451

      If character formatting has been applied to more than half the characters of a paragraph, Word will remove it, otherwise it will leave it alone. The majority of the first paragraph in your document is Italic, so Word resets it.

      Reply | Quote
      • WSDennis Hartley
        AskWoody Lounger
        September 13, 2006 at 6:49 pm #1028494

        Thanks, Hans.
        What a silly way for Word to behave. It always thinks it knows better !
        Is there a way of stopping this ?

        Dennis

        Reply | Quote
        • WSHansV
          AskWoody Lounger
          September 13, 2006 at 7:20 pm #1028501

          If you use character styles consistently to apply formatting such as bold or italic to parts of a paragraph, you stand a much better chance of preserving the character formatting when applying a paragraph style.

          Reply | Quote
          • WSDennis Hartley
            AskWoody Lounger
            September 14, 2006 at 2:19 pm #1028593

            This sounds like a bit of a bug to me. Can see a reason for this feature!
            It can be quite a problem with books where italics could be used extensively in Footnotes. I’ll need to be a lot more careful when dealing with them. Is there a way to write some sort of macro that can assess how much italics or bold there is in a paragraph? I suppose a count of each characters’ format compared to the total characters should do it.

            Thanks Hans,

            Dennis.

            Reply | Quote
            • WSjudithmc
              AskWoody Lounger
              September 15, 2006 at 4:37 am #1028717

              Dennis,

              You’re looking for the labour intensive way to do it. There’s an easier and more permanent way.

              Word has some excellent features including character styles. Why not define a Character Style, for example, “Citation”? Make the style italic. Add this style to your formatting toolbar just next to the italic button. From now on whenever you are citing a book, apply the style “Citation” instead of directly formatting it italic.

              To bring all your existing documentation up to your new standard, do a search and replace and replace all italic text with the style “citation”.

              Words etc formatted with a character style rarely change when the surrounding paragraph changes style.

              Good luck,
              Judith

              Reply | Quote
            • WSDennis Hartley
              AskWoody Lounger
              September 15, 2006 at 7:27 am #1028719

              Excellent.
              I’ve only been using Styles to any great extent these past few years and this is the first time I’ve hit this problem.
              I never realised that you could create a Style at character level like that – sorry Hans I realise now what you were saying. Problem sorted!

              I still think it’s a bug in Word though!

              Thanks very much to all….

              Dennis

              Reply | Quote
            • WSDennis Hartley
              AskWoody Lounger
              September 17, 2006 at 2:36 pm #1028968

              Re-styling a document is not quite a simple as I thought. After much experimenting even defining a character style as say “Italics” and that changing and italic text to that style still doesn’t always stop Word from resetting it. However after much reading up on the subject I’m beginning to devise a strategy to cope with the documents I get to “sort out” The main problem seems to be this more than 50% of a paragraphs text being something that isn’t regular when re-styled Word resets it all to regular even that tagged as “Italics” style. The sort of problems I deal with are books that have been created as “camera ready” that now need fixing because the publisher has changes the page dimensions etc., the things needs to be in pdf format as well and in both cases the books are a disaster! I’ve had footnotes that are actually “Header 1” made to look like a footnote, bits of text in a paragraph that as well as being tagged “Title” are slightly condensed. Words “keep track of formatting” and “highlight inconsistencies” are great for these type of errors. It amazes me how they got there in the first place!

              Many thanks to all for your help.

              TTFN
              Dennis

              Reply | Quote
            • WSjudithmc
              AskWoody Lounger
              September 17, 2006 at 11:37 pm #1029004

              Dennis,
              I’ve met documents like this with the main body formatted as Header and then direct formatted to “look right” – it’s a real nuisance to sort out.

              Have you used the “Style area”? – in Normal and Outline view, you can open up a narrow area on the left that shows the name of the style used in the paragraph. (This doesn’t work in tables).
              Also , I use “Reveal formatting” and turn on “Distinguish style source”.

              One more thing about character formatting: It acts like a TOGGLE; for example, if your paragraph style font is italic (say you’ve defined a style “DirectQuote” and you apply the character style “Citation” to the name of a book within the paragraph, this will turn OFF the italic since both the paragraph style and the character style toggle italic.

              Good luck.
              Judith

              Reply | Quote
            • WSDennis Hartley
              AskWoody Lounger
              September 18, 2006 at 7:34 am #1029015

              Thanks, Judith, for your comments. It’s quite amazing how Word manages to let people do the things they do that “look” right ! I’ve been running over various strategies in my head as to how best to tackle these documents and decided to replace all Bold, Italics and Bold Italics with character styles to reflect them – this seems to survive quite a lot. Then to step through the paragraphs applying “Normal” to each of them. The idea is to reset the text to a default state but keep the character formatting. I can then use Word’s “Keep track of formatting” and “Highlight inconsistencies ” to correct the other weird things people do. After this re-tagging with the correct styles is easy.

              TTN
              Dennis

              Reply | Quote
    Viewing 0 reply threads
    Reply To: Problem with Styles (Word 2003 – all patches)

    You can use BBCodes to format your content.
    Your account can't use all available BBCodes, they will be stripped before saving.

    Your information:




DON'T MISS OUT!
Subscribe to the Free Newsletter
We promise not to spam you. Unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

View the Forum

  • Recent Replies
  • My Replies
  • My Active Topics
  • New Posts in the Last day
  • Private Messages
  • Knowledge Base
  • How to use the Forums
  • All Forums

    • Recent Topics

    My Profile

    June 2025
    S M T W T F S
    1234567
    891011121314
    15161718192021
    22232425262728
    2930  

    Remembering Woody

     

    Want to Advertise in the free newsletter? How about a gift subscription in honor of a birthday? Send an email to sb@askwoody.com to ask how.

    Mastodon profile for DefConPatch
    Mastodon profile for AskWoody

     

    Home • About • FAQ • Posts & Privacy • Forums • My Account
    Register • Free Newsletter • Plus Membership • Gift Certificates • MS-DEFCON Alerts

    Copyright ©2004-2025 by AskWoody Tech LLC. All Rights Reserved.