Changing Style Sheets

If you scratch your name into wet cement , you have only a few minutes to change your mind. After that, your formatting decisions are cast in stone, so to speak. Fortunately, style sheets are much more forgiving . Not only can you modify a style sheet whenever you want, you're free to manually modify text to which style sheets have been applied.

Modifying style sheets

The most important thing to know about modifying a style sheet is that all text to which a modified style sheet has been applied is automatically updated. Additionally, if you modify a "parent" style sheet, all "children" style sheets that were created by choosing Based On are also automatically updated.

There are two ways to modify an existing style sheet. You can

• Click on the style sheet name in the Character Styles or Paragraph Styles pane, and then choose Style Options from the pane's palette menu. The Modify Character Style Options or the Modify Paragraph Style Options dialog box is displayed. These dialog boxes are the same as the New Character Style and New Paragraph Style dialog boxes. Make whatever changes you want, then click OK.

• Double-click on a style sheet name to display the Modify Character Style Options or Modify Paragraph Style Options dialog box. If text is highlighted, the style sheet you double-click is applied to the text; if no text is selected, the style sheet you double-click becomes the default style and is automatically applied when you enter text in a newly created box. If you hold down Shift+ z or Ctrl+Shift when you double-click on a style sheet name, the style sheet is not applied to text.

Modifying text that's been styled with a style sheet

If you need to change the appearance of text that's been formatted using a style sheet, all you have to do is highlight the text ‚ characters or paragraphs ‚ and then use the Control palette, Character pane (Window ‚ Type & Tables ‚ Character, or z +T or Ctrl+T), or the Paragraph pane (Window ‚ Type & Tables ‚ Character, or Option+ z +T or Ctrl+Alt+T) to change the formats.

When you change any formats in text to which a style sheet has been applied, you are making "local" changes (to make "global" changes, you would modify the style sheet). When you change formatting in style-sheet formatted text, a plus sign (+) is displayed next to the style-sheet name in the Character Styles or Paragraph Styles pane, as shown in Figure 20-7.

Figure 20-7: A "local" format (the italic type style) has been applied to the highlighted text below, which was formatted with a style sheet. The + sign next to the style-sheet name in the Paragraph Styles pane indicates that local formatting has been applied within the paragraph.

Unapplying style sheets

If you want, you can remove the link between style sheet ‚ formatted text and the assigned style sheet. All you have to do is highlight the text ‚ a range of characters if you want to disassociate them from the applied character style sheet or one or more paragraphs if you want to disassociate it/them from the applied paragraph style sheet ‚ then choose No Paragraph Style from the Paragraph Styles pane or No Character Style from the Character Styles pane. When you break the link between text and its applied style sheet, any local formatting is retained unless you hold down the Option or Alt key when you choose No Paragraph Style or No Character Style. If you hold down the Option or Alt key, local formatting is removed.

Along the same lines, if you delete a style sheet that's been applied to text, the formatting of that text remains unchanged, but if you click within or highlight the text, No Paragraph Style or No Character Style is displayed in the corresponding pane.