Paragraph
Text Styles
Paragraph text carries several more attributes than artistic text, and
all of them can be saved to a style. You already know about bullets, thanks
to all of those bullet styles in the default template. You can also include
tabs, indents, hyphenation, large first characters, and all spacing controls.
You cannot, however, include columns in a style. Essentially, styles can
be applied to the text within a frame of paragraph text, but not to the
frame itself. So elements like frame size, rotation, skew, or column alignment
are not part of a paragraph text style.
We either do not understand how paragraph text is supposed to work, or
there has been a bug associated with it for several versions. The following
is a typical encounter for our lead author:
Im working on a brochure, with lots of copy. My frame of paragraph
text has several headlines and lots of body text. I create a style for
the headlines, using one of them as a prototype, and begin applying
it to other headlines. But the prototype that I used to create the style
never got the style name applied to it. My cursor was blinking away
inside that headline, yet DRAW still refers to it as Default Paragraph
Text. And those asterisks...they never go away!
We feel the pain of our leaderits happened to all of us.
Indeed, DRAWs behavior with paragraph text is unconventional, to
say the least. Youll probably need to tell DRAW more than once to
apply or update paragraph text styles.
And the asterisks of which he speaks with such angst refer to DRAWs
way of telling you that an object has been formatted outside of the styles
format. The asterisk appears in the Style list, which is only visible
when your cursor is planted in text. In theory, you make the asterisk
go away by reapplying the style to the element. In other words, you say
to the text, Whatever exception format you have applied to you,
lose itadhere to the format of the style. Unfortunately, we
regularly encounter instances where we could reapply the style all day,
and the asterisk never disappears.
We sure sound like curmudgeons in this chapter, but were also not
real wild about the defaults that Corel chose for paragraph text. Weve
already vented about the choice of AvantGarde; further to that, the size
for Default Paragraph Text is 24 points, with 28 points of interline space.
We dont know about you, but we usually create paragraph text at
about 10 or 12 points, not 24. We frequently draw a nice little frame
in a particular area of a drawing, only to find that the 24-point cursor
wont even fit!
So again, we recommend that you quiz yourself on the ways that you usually
use the Paragraph Text tool and then adjust the default style to reflect
that. When you have it to your liking, use one of the techniques mentioned
above to make it permanent.
And if you are setting a lot of copy and you need uniformity, you might
want to consider doing what we do: use Ventura Publisher.
Applying Styles
There are numerous ways to apply styles, including the Styles list that
is present for text editing. Other than that, you can:
- Double-click the style name in the docker.
- Right-click the style name and choose Apply
Style.
- Right-click on the object, go to Styles Ø
Apply, and then pick the desired one.
Applying Styles with Hotkeys
As if the three previous methods werent enough, you can also set
up hotkeys (keyboard shortcuts) to speed up the job.
The easiest way to assign a hotkey to a style is to right-click the style
in the docker and choose Edit Hotkey. From the Shortcut Keys dialog, enter
a hotkey combination in the Press New Shortcut Key box. In Figure 31.2,
we chose Ctrl+H, and DRAW immediately informed us that Force Justification
owned that keystroke. We were able to take it away, but we had to conscientiously
click Delete Conflicts before the Assign button would function.
With that hotkey defined, we can turn a paragraph into a headline by
pressing Ctrl+H. Chapter 34 offers further detail on custom
hotkeys.
FIGURE
31.2 Custom hotkeys can dramatically speed up
the process of applying styles.
Changing Style Attributes
As youve seen, applying styles is easy, and so is changing a styles
attributes. In fact, changing a style can be done by simply repeating
the routine for creating the style in the first place: once you have reformatted
the object to your liking, right-click, go to Styles Ø
Save Style Properties, and save the style. The dialog that appears is
just like the one used to create the style.
If the Styles docker is open, you have two more ways to change the styles
properties to that of a particular object. You can right-click the style
name and choose Copy Properties From. Then use the bold pointer to click
on the object whose properties you want to use to update the style. Because
this method skips the Save Style As dialog, you do not get the opportunity
to omit some of the objects properties from the style.
As mentioned earlier, you can also change a style by choosing Properties
from the context menu, which takes you to the dialog shown in Figure 31.3
(yet another page in the seemingly endless network of Options settings).
This doubles as a style checkeryou can go here to see at a glance
what the attributes are. In the case of Figure 31.3, we see that the style
calls for a solid fill of a medium brown tone, and a black hairline outline.
FIGURE
31.3 You can view and edit styles from the Styles
page of Options.
DRAW offers no preview for style changes, but you can undo them once
you get back to the page if you dont like the results.
Overriding
Style Attributes
The idea behind styles is, of course, to make your formatting tasks more
efficient. Being able to apply consistent fill, outline, and font attributes
to objects is an important element of that efficiency. Nevertheless, there
will undoubtedly be times when you wish to format one object independently,
and despite our earlier rant about the dreaded asterisk, overriding styles
works as expected with graphics and artistic text.
In Figure 31.4, all of the objects use the Fountain Graphic style, but
we filled the circle in the center with white. We overrode the style.
FIGURE
31.4 Local formatting overrides formatting applied
by a style.
Any change we make to the fill of the style will not be applied to the
center circle, because we formatted it locallyapart
from the style formatting. It is still attached to the Fountain Graphic
style, and if we updated the outline settings of the style, all of the
objects would change, including the circle in the center. The so-called
local formatting takes precedence over the objects fill,
but the other attributes are still getting their instructions from the
style.
The circle in the center retains its local formatting (in this case,
the fill) until another style is applied or the original style is reapplied.
Renaming, Deleting, and
FindingStyles
After creating a style, you can rename or delete it using the docker.
You cannot rename or delete the default styles, however.
- To rename a style, right-click it and choose
Rename, or click twice on its name (not a double-click, but two clicks
in slow succession).
- To delete a style, right-click it and choose
Delete, or just select it and press Delete.
If your drawing contains a lot of elements, it can be tough to remember
which style is applied to which object. You can find objects with a specific
style using the Find command. To find occurrences of a style, right-click
the desired style in the docker and choose Find. DRAW will select the
first object to which the style is applied. Choose Find Next to select
the next, and keep going until youve located all the objects using
that style. Objects that have local formatting will be identified in this
searchthey still have the style applied, even if they also carry
local formatting.
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| TIP If youre looking
for more than a couple of objects with the same style, DRAWs
Find Wizard is more efficient than the Find feature described above.
You can open the Wizard from Edit Ø
Find and Replace. For more details, see the next chapter.
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