Duplicate Paragraph and Text Style windows

[Petar Petrenko]

Hi,

 

clicking on "Create Paragraph Style" and "Create Text Style" open the exactly same windows. They even crash on same place as I described in this topic:

 

[1.5.0.14] Crash: Text Styles: double click "no style"

[Dave Harris]

Opening the same window is intentional, but the initial settings should be different. The "Paragraph Style" one should have Type set to Paragraph, Based on set to the paragraph style of the selected text, and all the attributes set to the text's changes from that style. The "Text Style" one should give a completely empty style, with Type set to group.

[Petar Petrenko]

OK, if so, but in that case "Text style" must be without Paragraph style options and vice versa.

[Dave Harris]

There's actually not much difference between character styles and paragraph styles. Both can store all the attributes, and they can be based on each other. Likewise "Text styles", or group styles. The idea of group styles is that other styles be based on them, so they can be a common place to set attributes that the other styles use. Whether a style is "Group", "Paragraph" or "Character" mostly affects which toolbar lists they appear in, which studio panels they appear in, and what the default action is when you click on them in the Text Styles panel. You can apply paragraph styles to character text, and vice versa, if you want. The hope is that having a single, unified system will be more flexible, and less restrictive, than having two parallel separate sets of styles.

[Petar Petrenko]

I just don't see the purpose why character style must contain paragraph attributes. It is applied to selected text not to the whole paragraph.

[Dave Harris]

You can apply character styles to whole paragraphs by using Apply to Paragraphs from the Text Styles menu. If you check Show in both panels in the style editor, it will appear in the Paragraph studio panel and you can apply it to whole paragraphs from there, too. If you have, say, a figure numbers as captions below pictures, and you want the body text to include a reference to the figure, it may be convenient to use the same style for each. Or at least to have a character style (for the body text) that is based on the paragraph style (for the caption). It's some extra flexibility that is available. You don't have to use it if you don't want to.

[Petar Petrenko]

I use InDesign and QuarkXPress heavily in my everyday tasks and I am very familiar to their functionality (especially for printing).

My opinion is that InDesign has the ultimate solution about character styles, but their paragraph styles need little additional work to be OK. I mean in additional options to be included and some rearrangements of the existing ones.

Opposite to InDesign, QuarkXPress has a little bit different approach. Their paragraph styles are not as rich as InDesign's one and you don't have all the options you need in one place. You have to dig in different menus to find what you want to include in them. So, it is a little bit difficult to define a complex paragraph styles inside QXP. Also, defining character attributes in paragraph styles is a bit different than in InDesign. You can't define character attributes inside paragraph styles but you need to link previously created character style to an existing paragraph style.