Office 2003 XML

More on Styles

Having come this far in the chapter, you should already know a few key aspects of how styles work in Word and WordprocessingML:

• A style is a grouping of property settings that can be applied as a unit.

• There are four kinds of styles: paragraph, character, table, and list.

• Styles are defined using w:style elements inside a WordprocessingML document’s w:styles element.

• Paragraphs, runs, and tables can be directly associated with a style of the appropriate kind through the w:pStyle, w:rStyle, and w:tblStyle elements, respectively.

You should also know the basic syntax of the w:style element, and four aspects in particular:

• The w:type attribute, indicating the type of style defined here (paragraph, character, table, or list)

• The w:default attribute, indicating whether this style is the default style for its type

• The w:styleId attribute for intra-document references to this style

• The w:name element, indicating the style’s primary name as exposed in the Word UI

In this section, we’ll look at a few more aspects of how styles are defined, how default styles work (or don’t), how to derive styles, and how style conflicts are resolved.

A Document’s Styles

All styles that are used within a document must also be defined in the document. This effectively means that you can’t leverage Word’s built-in styles outside of Word; i.e., you can’t simply refer to them by name. When a document uses a built-in Word style, Word makes a copy of the built-in style, rather than merely a reference ...