Introduction

Style is a named collection of various formatting information that defines the look and behavior of document paragraphs associated with this style.

Every paragraph always has the associated style. The style of the current document paragraph is indicated through the Style toolbar combo box:

The name of the style associated with the paragraph from the above screen capture, is Normal. It is the most basic style available in any Atlantis document.

You can associate any paragraph from your document with any style available in this document. This operation is called apply style. When you apply a style to a paragraph, Atlantis associates the paragraph with this style, and formats the paragraph according to the formatting information available in this style.

The fact that a paragraph is associated with a style, means that any change to the formatting of this style would be automatically applied to this and any other paragraphs associated with this style. So by making changes to the formatting of a style, you can easily control the formatting of all teh associated paragraphs. This is a powerful mechanism for controlling the document formatting.

You can not only apply styles to paragraphs, and make changes to a style. You can also add new styles to your document, or remove existing styles.

Style properties

Every style includes the following properties (formatting characteristics):

• Font format, Paragraph format, Tab positions, List formatting, and Borders.
  
  All these characteristics define the formatting of the associated paragraphs.
  
  
• Base style.
  
  Normally style doesn't include all possible paragraph or font formatting characteristics. All these missing (unspecified) characteristics are retrieved from a base style (for a style on which this style is based) if any.
  
  
• Next paragraph style.
  
  When you complete typing a paragraph, and press Enter (note that the blinking caret should be immediately after the last character of this paragraph - ie immediately before its paragraph end mark), Atlantis creates a new paragraph. After this Atlantis automatically applies the Next paragraph style of the current style to a newly created paragraph.
  
  
• Hot key.
  
  If a style has the associated hot key, you can press this hot key to apply this style to the currently selected paragraphs.

You can change all these properties through Format | Style... dialog, or by clicking the Style toolbar button. You can also make any change to the styles of your document through the Styles panel of the Control Board.

Style-related operations

Even though every paragraph always has an associated style, you can still apply any custom formatting to your paragraph. For example, you can format your paragraph in bold when according to the style's properties the associated paragraphs should be non-bold.

After making such changes to the formatting of your paragraph, you might still wish to revert to the original formatting contained by the associated style. In such cases you can use the two special commands:

• Reset font format.
  
  This command reapplies the font format of the associated style to the whole text of the selected paragraphs.
  
  To perform this command, click the Reset font format toolbar button, or press CtrlSpace.
  
  
• Reset paragraph format.
  
  This command reapplies the paragraph format of the associated style to the selected paragraphs.
  
  To perform this command, click the Reset paragraph format toolbar button, or press CtrlQ.

See also...