[scribus] Styles and Italic [now Character]

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 04 Sep 2012 21:52:10 -0700
Barry McKenna <bmcken at pobox.com> dijo:

>Yes, your "confidence" is well placed: I use the properties palette 
>quite often and I am frequently grateful for its excellent features
>and design.
>
>One remaining lack of understanding (at least), due to my newbie 
>relationship with the power and features of styles, is how to make use 
>of character styles _without_ the character style as part of the 
>paragraph styles.
>
>Perhaps I am missing some fundamental conceptualization - I'm sure
>that is likely - but I do not understand the specific utilizations of
>this feature. The Help file gives some detailed explanation about the 
>hierarchy of this feature, but I lack any example of why one would use 
>this. My imagination raises the potential of using a Character Style
>to adjust/alter one or more words or phrases or lines: Is this its
>main utility?

Whether a paragraph style or a character style, there are two main
benefits:

1) Enforce consistency throughout the document:
	For example, I recently did a student textbook of 238 pages. I
	wanted new vocabulary items to be bold and italic within the
	text, making it easier for students to spot them. I could have
	simply applied bold and italic to each word, but by using a
	character style it made it easier to be sure that I didn't
	suddenly forget somewhere in the middle of the book and start
	using a different formatting.

2) Make it easy to effect global changes:
	Using the same example textbook, what if I got to the end of
	the book and decided that bold and italic was too much, and
	simple italics only would look better. If I had used local
	formatting for each vocabulary item I would have to go through
	the entire document and change each term manually. But since I
	had applied the formatting with a character style all I had to
	do was edit the style and click on Apply. Voilà! The formatting
	was automatically changed for all terms. 

The longer the work the more important styles are. When doing a
master's thesis I had tons of citations, and once in a while long
quotations. If the quotation is more than a sentence you are supposed
to set it as a separate paragraph with indents on both sides, and in a
font slightly smaller. But since this formatting did not occur very
often it would be easy to forget. So the first time I found a long
quotation in the work I set the indents and point sizes manually, and
then copied the settings as a paragraph style. Even if no long quotes
occurred for the next 100 pages I could be sure that my formatting was
consistent because I applied it with the paragraph style.