Request: Edit Style keyboard shortcut in Publisher

[Evaluation complete.]

A keyboard shortcut I used non-stop in my days with LibreOffice was Alt-P for 'Edit Style'. LibreOffice is exemplary in its style-oriented design, and I often updated my styles, especially in the early phases when I noticed imbalances in layout. The same goes for Publisher or Microsoft Word. I polish my layout as I develop and refine it.

It would be helpful to have a similar keyboard shortcut in Publisher - 'Edit Text Style' - as it's simply the fastest way to activate edit style, especially if the text style panel is closed or far away. There are shortcuts for all kinds of text style functionality in Publisher – just not for actually editing a style.

Here’s exactly how this shortcut should work:

• If the cursor is placed in a paragraph formatted with a text style, open the text style dialog.
• If the cursor is placed in a paragraph formatted with a character style, open the character style dialog.
• If the cursor is in a paragraph without a text style attribute or edit is N/A, no action or dialog.

The most frequent thing I do with styles is adjust them, so this would be a clear improvement to my workflow.

[Oufti]

This is not an answer to your demand but I'll present how I do it with Affinity.

When I see a need to polish a style:

1. I select only a word in an unmodified portion of that style (I check there is no + aside the style name). 
2. I use the contextual toolbar or the Paragraph and Character panels to change whatever I want.
3. I click on the Update style button next to it in the contextual toolbar. 

So no need to open the Edit style dialog, that I almost only use when I want to create or troubleshoot styles. 

[Evaluation complete.]

Yes, it can work for minor adjustments. The thing is, the toolbar panels in Publisher are cluttered and scattered, and in my opinion, have rather poor usability. It's precisely the kind of mess I'm trying to avoid, where I have to zigzag my mouse, eyes, and attention all over the place.

When I adjust styles, it's not just minor formatting tweaks; it's often flow settings, spacing, hyphenation zones, even decorations, and other elements that are structured and simply accessible in the text style dialog. These are things I can see simply don't work in my quite large books without ad hoc adjustments as the book evolves. It’s agile work, like so much else.

The text style dialog is wonderfully structured; everything is gathered in one place, the predictability of my actions when I click OK is at its maximum, and to me, it simply feels like the best place for a thorough layout designer to work with more complex setups, where I also inspect inheritance if I'm not entirely sure what's happening.

Fortunately, this dialog should just be one shortcut away – for customers like me.

[Oufti]

1 hour ago, Ingelise said:

Fortunately, this dialog should just be one shortcut away – for customers like me.

The problem is that the Edit style dialog doesn't let us choose which style to edit. 
It's already possible to assign a keyboard shortcut to many other style related commands but Edit style doesn't appear in the menus. 

[Evaluation complete.]

There isn’t a problem in the request at all. As I wrote in the first post, ‘Edit style’ should open the editing of the style applied to the text where the cursor is positioned. Exactly as LibreOffice has always done. Open the text style editor if a paragraph style is applied, and the character style editor if a character style is applied.

[MikeTO]

+1

Good suggestion. There should be Edit Paragraph Style and Edit Character Style commands in the menu and then you'd be able to assign keyboard shortcuts. The commands would simply be disabled if the cursor wasn't in a text frame. If a range of text was selected, it would just use the attributes at the start or end of the selected range.

In the meantime, you can adjust your styles by changing attributes directly for text on the page and then use your keyboard shortcut to updating its style. It's the opposite way of working but works just as well.

[Evaluation complete.]

3 hours ago, MikeTO said:

+1

Good suggestion. There should be Edit Paragraph Style and Edit Character Style commands in the menu and then you'd be able to assign keyboard shortcuts. The commands would simply be disabled if the cursor wasn't in a text frame. If a range of text was selected, it would just use the attributes at the start or end of the selected range.

Exactly.

[Evaluation complete.]

4 hours ago, MikeTO said:

In the meantime, you can adjust your styles by changing attributes directly for text on the page and then use your keyboard shortcut to updating its style. It's the opposite way of working but works just as well.

Yes, I’m familiar with the existing methodology, but I overwhelmingly prefer to have as little interface and panel clutter as possible while assessing my layout and in much of my work. So, I look forward to being able to bring up the other functionality with a single keystroke.