Test Driving Linux

Advanced Formatting with Styles

Styles are one of the most powerful and important features of word processing. Using styles, you can create consistency of appearance and formatting in a document or across documents. A style is simply a saved set of formatting choices that you can then apply with just a few mouse clicks. As an example of using styles, imagine that you've created a 100-page document with a lot of headings, and you later decide that you need to make the headings bigger so they will stand out more. If you originally applied your heading font sizes manually, you would need to go through each heading one at a time in order to change its font size. However, if you used a heading style to create all your headings, all you'd need to do is change the font size in the style, and all of your headings would update automatically. It's easy to see how this could save you a lot of time and prevent a lot of formatting errors. Styles even make it possible for a group of people to maintain a consistent look in all of their documents, which is useful in a business setting.

The Stylist

In Writer, the interface to the Styles toolset is a floating palette called the Stylist. You can open the Stylist by pressing the Stylist on/off button on the Function Bar (the button looks like a page with a tiny hand in the corner). Alternately, you can press the function key F11.

The Stylist lets you toggle among five different style types or categories, each of which applies to a specific type of ...