Problem with Styles (Word 2003 – all patches)

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I have always assumed that when a style was applied to a paragraph any underling formatting – i.e. Bold, Italics etc – remains untouched.
The attached example of two bibliographic entries hopefully show the problem I

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If character formatting has been applied to more than half the characters of a paragraph, Word will remove it, otherwise it will leave it alone. The majority of the first paragraph in your document is Italic, so Word resets it.

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Thanks, Hans.
What a silly way for Word to behave. It always thinks it knows better !
Is there a way of stopping this ?

Dennis

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If you use character styles consistently to apply formatting such as bold or italic to parts of a paragraph, you stand a much better chance of preserving the character formatting when applying a paragraph style.

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This sounds like a bit of a bug to me. Can see a reason for this feature!
It can be quite a problem with books where italics could be used extensively in Footnotes. I’ll need to be a lot more careful when dealing with them. Is there a way to write some sort of macro that can assess how much italics or bold there is in a paragraph? I suppose a count of each characters’ format compared to the total characters should do it.

Thanks Hans,

Dennis.

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Dennis,

You’re looking for the labour intensive way to do it. There’s an easier and more permanent way.

Word has some excellent features including character styles. Why not define a Character Style, for example, “Citation”? Make the style italic. Add this style to your formatting toolbar just next to the italic button. From now on whenever you are citing a book, apply the style “Citation” instead of directly formatting it italic.

To bring all your existing documentation up to your new standard, do a search and replace and replace all italic text with the style “citation”.

Words etc formatted with a character style rarely change when the surrounding paragraph changes style.

Good luck,
Judith

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Excellent.
I’ve only been using Styles to any great extent these past few years and this is the first time I’ve hit this problem.
I never realised that you could create a Style at character level like that – sorry Hans I realise now what you were saying. Problem sorted!

I still think it’s a bug in Word though!

Thanks very much to all….

Dennis

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Re-styling a document is not quite a simple as I thought. After much experimenting even defining a character style as say “Italics” and that changing and italic text to that style still doesn’t always stop Word from resetting it. However after much reading up on the subject I’m beginning to devise a strategy to cope with the documents I get to “sort out” The main problem seems to be this more than 50% of a paragraphs text being something that isn’t regular when re-styled Word resets it all to regular even that tagged as “Italics” style. The sort of problems I deal with are books that have been created as “camera ready” that now need fixing because the publisher has changes the page dimensions etc., the things needs to be in pdf format as well and in both cases the books are a disaster! I’ve had footnotes that are actually “Header 1” made to look like a footnote, bits of text in a paragraph that as well as being tagged “Title” are slightly condensed. Words “keep track of formatting” and “highlight inconsistencies” are great for these type of errors. It amazes me how they got there in the first place!

Many thanks to all for your help.

TTFN
Dennis

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Dennis,
I’ve met documents like this with the main body formatted as Header and then direct formatted to “look right” – it’s a real nuisance to sort out.

Have you used the “Style area”? – in Normal and Outline view, you can open up a narrow area on the left that shows the name of the style used in the paragraph. (This doesn’t work in tables).
Also , I use “Reveal formatting” and turn on “Distinguish style source”.

One more thing about character formatting: It acts like a TOGGLE; for example, if your paragraph style font is italic (say you’ve defined a style “DirectQuote” and you apply the character style “Citation” to the name of a book within the paragraph, this will turn OFF the italic since both the paragraph style and the character style toggle italic.

Good luck.
Judith

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Thanks, Judith, for your comments. It’s quite amazing how Word manages to let people do the things they do that “look” right ! I’ve been running over various strategies in my head as to how best to tackle these documents and decided to replace all Bold, Italics and Bold Italics with character styles to reflect them – this seems to survive quite a lot. Then to step through the paragraphs applying “Normal” to each of them. The idea is to reset the text to a default state but keep the character formatting. I can then use Word’s “Keep track of formatting” and “Highlight inconsistencies ” to correct the other weird things people do. After this re-tagging with the correct styles is easy.

TTN
Dennis

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