"Stacking" character styles (eg one for color, another for size)

[countbasil]

Maybe there's another way to do this: I want to be able to add a text size or a text color to SOME text within a paragraph regardless of the paragraph style.

So I in various places, I might want to de-emphasize some text with the same "gray" or the same small text size....And that text could be parenthetical phrases at the end of various paragraphs (for example in "body" text, labels, and bulleted items), each of which have their own paragraph styles. 

I don't want to have to define a character style for "gray", "smaller", and "gray smaller" to be able to use either or both of these character styles...But I can't add BOTh character styles "gray" and "smaller" to the same text...But I want to do this with a "style" so if I choose to change the gray, or the specific smaller text size, it changes everywhere in the document.

Any recommendations? Thank you

[sfriedberg]

I agree that this would be very useful.  I'm running into an increasing number of cases involving fonts where the different weights are not organized into the same font family, but rather there's a separate "family" of roman and italic for each weight.  Without editing the font metadata in a font editor (probably violating licenses), there's nothing the user can do to modify how the individual fonts are grouped.  So you can't apply "bold" or "emphasis" in these cases without changing the font family.  But then if I want to change the font size overall, I have to manually update every style, both the basic paragraph style and any/all character styles customized to apply to that paragraph style.

While this is a slightly different scenario than countbasil presents, both situations could be resolved if 1) styles could be overlapped, and 2) you could specify "no change" (or inherit) for a more comprehensive set of properties.  Like setting font family without setting font size.

[h_d]

12 hours ago, countbasil said:

Any recommendations?

You clearly can't apply two character styles to the same run of characters, at least not in Affinity Publisher. That's the nature of the beast.

However, there is one way of changing a colour everywhere in a document - swatches and global colours. 

In the Swatches palette, I created a new palette called "Global true greys" (in part to distinguish it from the RGB so-called greys in the default installation). 

With nothing selected, I then used the CMYK sliders in the Colour palette to create a fill colour of 0C 0M 0Y 30K. 

Back in the Swatches palette, I added the current colour as a global colour. I renamed it "Light grey"

I then created "Mid grey" (0C 0M 0Y 50K) and "Dark grey" (0C 0M 0Y 70K).

This is my Swatches palette:

In my document, I have a character style called "Small". I applied it to a couple of words - "connection" and "dreamy" below. I then applied "Mid grey" to those words. I also applied "Mid grey" to a word in normal paragraph style - "some" below:

I then deselected all the words, and edited "Mid grey" using the Swatches palette:

The colour of all the "Mid grey" words changes as I edit the global swatch.

I'm not sure if this does exactly what you want, but it may offer a partial solution.

Cheers,

H

 

[countbasil]

@h_d, wow, that's SUPER useful! Not exactly what I was hoping but helpful. 

A problem that remains with this is that the custom colors don't move with the document, so this  would work only on the ORIGINAL computer? 

[Seneca]

On 10/5/2020 at 1:53 AM, countbasil said:

I don't want to have to define a character style for "gray", "smaller", and "gray smaller" to be able to use either or both of these character styles.

If memory serves me well this is available in VivaDesigner.

This is quite a useful feature and I would encourage you to submit it as a suggestion and who know it might be added to the program in the future.

I too, thought about it a while back but never submitted it as a suggestion.