Possible to edit "styles"?

[Nathan Shirley]

Is it possible to edit a custom preset "styles" without creating a new one? I'm hoping to be able to change the hyphenation behaviour within a "styles" so that it will update all text boxes which use it.

[walt.farrell]

To keep the terminology correct, you seem to be talking about Text Styles, which are not the same thing as Styles.

Yes, you can edit a Text Style. Look in the Text Styles studio panel, find the style, and double-click on it. Make the changes you want, and click OK to save it. Note that this will affect only the current document. If you wanted to change the style for future documents that you create, the hamburger/settings menu for the panel has an option to save the current text styles as defaults.

[Nathan Shirley]

Actually no, I am talking about "styles," not "text styles." The reason why I'm not using text styles for this is because some of these styles include "text frames," which (for some reason) "text styles" don't include.

Your tip about setting text styles as defaults to work across projects is a good one though, I'll keep that in mind.

[walt.farrell]

But Styles have nothing, in general, to do with Hyphenation. That's primarily controlled in the Text Styles. Though, since it can be controlled in the Character panel if you're not using Text Styles, that might be what you're thinking of.

If so, given your question:

1. You cannot edit Styles. But also,
2. There are no preset Styles for Text Frames.
3. You can create a Style from a Text Frame that you have selected, and it will pick up things like the current font, font size, font weight, and I suppose (though I haven't tested) it might pick up the  Paragraph panel settings and the Character panel settings. That could allow a Style to affect hyphenation.

So if you wanted to create a Style, and if it picks up all those things, you could apply that Style to other Text Frames. But you won't be able to edit your Style. You can only delete it and recreate.

You could also consider saving a pre-configured Text Frame as an Asset, which might be simpler in some ways. Also non-editable, though. You would have to create an instance of the Asset, modify it, delete the original, and resave the Asset.

 

[Nathan Shirley]

1) That's what I was afraid of.

2) In my case I made several Styles which do include text frames.

3) Yes, it also picks up Paragraph settings.

I've been using Styles for several variations of what I had previously used Text Styles for. Someone on this forum pointed me to Styles since text frames couldn't be saved in Text Styles. I now have a project with easily 100 seperate boxes of text created with the same Style... but which I now wish to modify the hyphenation rules of. Styles does save Paragraph settings, including hyphenation.

So I'll change this to a feature request:

Allow Styles to be modified in a similar way that they're saved. Select the modified object, right click on the Style you want to update/edit, and click on the new option "update Style from selection." That would be great.

And/or...

Allow Text Styles to include Text Frame parameters.

[walt.farrell]

The other point you may not have considered is that if you were able to modify a Style, it would not apply to the existing objects that had that Style.

When you apply a Text Style to some text, the link between the text and the Text Style is remembered. Changes made to the Text Style are then reflected to the text.

But Styles are a one-time thing. You apply a Style to an object, and that's it. There is no link that says "object X has Style Y". If you could change the Style later, the objects would not change.

[Nathan Shirley]

Ah, I didn't realize that, thanks. So yes, in that case Styles would definitely need to be linked to objects just as Text Styles are.