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Denise Barrett Olson

All About Styles

DigitalStorytelling

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ContentsParagraph styles 4......................................................

Character styles 4......................................................

List styles 4..................................................................

Styles and Templates 5...............................................

Assigning Styles 6.......................................................

Modifying Styles 6......................................................Creating New Styles 7................................................

List Styles 8.................................................................

Standard Styles 9........................................................

Naming Styles 9..........................................................

Summary 10................................................................

Resources 11...............................................................

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Any writing project becomes easier to manage once the

writer understands and exploits the features of his writing

tools. Larger projects like family histories take advantage

of word processing features not normally used in short,everyday projects. These features - table of contents

generation, indexing, footnotes and endnotes and

bibliographies - take advantage of another handy feature

- styles. This guide introduces you to styles and shows

you how use them in all your writing projects. And,

because styles are the basis for many other wordprocessing functions, it is important to understand how

they work and become comfortable using them before

tackling these advanced features.

Styles are pre-defined collections of format settings

which can be quickly assigned to selected text. Not onlydoes this speed initial formatting, it becomes even moreuseful when you want to make format changes to anexisting large document. For example, if the sectionheadings throughout your document have been styledusing Times New Roman font at 24pt, bold, centered and

black and now you want to change the color to red andmove them to the left margin, all you have to do ismodify the section heading style and your wordprocessor will automatically update every sectionheading within your document. This alone makeslearning to use styles worth the time, but this is just thebeginning of the benefits youll enjoy as you become

proficient with styles.

There are three different types of styles: paragraph,character and list. Its helpful to understand the difference

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between them so you can put them to best use withinyour document.

Paragraph stylesA paragraph is defined as all the text found between oneparagraph break and another. In word processing, youcreate a paragraph every time you press the Return keyso your word processor sees headings and even bulletedlists as paragraphs. Formatting applied to a paragraph is

more than just font type and size. It also includesproperties like line height, indents, space before andafter each paragraph and text alignment. Thanks tostyles theres no longer a need to add blank linesbetween paragraphs.

Character stylesWithin the paragraph, there may be some formattingapplied only to a few words. This would be a characterstyle. Some common examples of character styleformatting include bold, italics, underline and

strikethrough. While these styles may effect color andstyle of the text, they generally dont include layout andspacing attributes.

List styles

List styles are technically paragraph styles, but with theaddition of several choices for bullet or numberingoptions. For this reason, we will discuss them separately.Some word processing systems include outline styleswhich are special purpose lists.

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Styles and TemplatesStyles are saved in the document

template. When you create adocument based on a specifictemplate, you also receive the customstyles defined for that template.Every document you create is basedon a template. Even if you dontselect a specific template, your word

processor will use its default templateto create your document.

When you make changes to stylesand save your document, those stylechanges are saved only in that

document. If you want to update thetemplate with those changes, youmust also edit and save the templatefile.

Apples Pages offers a styles drawerto display the current documents

styles. In other applications, look forthe styles and formatting palette orwindow. All show the styles as theywill appear in your text, similar towhat you see here.

Most applications have several stylenames in common. Title generally refers to the title ofyour project and the various levels of Heading stylesare used not only to define formatting styles but alsodefine text for inclusion in your documents table of

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Pages Styles Drawer

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contents. In Microsoft Word (for both Windows and Mac),the Normal style is the default style for the body ofyour document. In iWork Pages this is the Body style.Most word processing applications include a basic set ofstyles for the more common document components likeheadings, bulleted lists, captions and footnotes. You canadd custom styles to suit the needs of your specificdocument. For example, if you are writing a cookbookyou might have a custom style for the ingredients listincluded in each recipe.

Assigning StylesAssigning a style to a piece of text is really quite simple.All you do is select the text, then double-click on thestyle you want from the style drawer/formatting palette.

For a paragraph style, generally your cursor only needs tobe located somewhere within the paragraph to style it.

Modifying StylesChanging your mind is easy when you use styles. Bymodifying a style you not only change the selected textor paragraph, but every other instance of this style withinyour document. So, should I decide I want all the textassigned the Heading 1 style to be green instead of blue,all I have to do is modify the style.

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In Pages, after making formatting changes to styled text,a red triangle appears to the right of the style namewhich opens a menu of options. By choosing RedefineStyle from Selection, I update all Heading 1 elements tomatch the new formatting. The process is very similar inother word processing applications.

Creating New StylesThere are times you will need to create a custom style

specific to your document. In my example, I would likethe the inscription to be centered and use a font morerepresentative of those found on headstones. Noproblem! I just format one instance of inscription text.The style originally assigned to that text - in this example,the Details style - shows the red triangle and when I clickon it I see the Create New Paragraph Style from Selectionoption. I will be prompted to give this new style a name.Once thats done, Ill see my new style in the list ofavailable styles. In this case, my new style has beennamed Inscription.

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Because this is a new style, there is only one instance ofthis style currently in use. I will need to assign this style toany additional inscriptions in my document.

List StylesThere are two categories of lists: ordered and unordered.An ordered list is a numbered list. This could range froma simple list like the top five vacation destinations to acomplex outline combining Arabic and Roman numeralswith alphabetic characters. An unordered list is alsoknown as a bulleted list. In addition to font and spacingconsiderations, you will also need to determine indentoptions and what numbering system to use for anordered list or which bullet character to use of anunordered list.

Pages offers the options of text bullets, image bulletsand custom image bullets. I can choose one of theoffered selections or create my own design and assign itusing the custom image option. For ordered lists, I canchoose from Arabic numerals, Roman numerals oralphabetic characters with several choices for separators

(such as decimal points or parentheses). I can also set upa tiered numbering system with different number types ateach level. Other word processing applications offersimilar options including the ability to totally customizethem yourself.

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Although these can take some time toset up, a custom-styled list canimprove the readability of specializedcontent such as a text-baseddescendant chart. By spending thetime to set indent spacing for eachgeneration level within your orderedlist, youve made your chart mucheasier to follow.

Standard StylesWhen you compare the customtemplates your word processingsoftware includes in the package withthe default template, you will find that

a standard set of styles are available ineach. The Heading 1, Heading 2,Heading 3 example is quite common.Often these standard style are usedfor additional word processingfunctions, such as table of contents generation. If you

create custom styles to replace the stock Header styles,you will also need to manually assign those custom styleswhen setting up other features which use the stock styles.

Naming Styles

When creating custom styles for your specific needs, its agood idea to give them names that describe therepurpose. In my earlier example, I named my new styleInscription. Since that document is a cemeteryinventory, Inscription is a style name relevant to the

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documents content. For this how-to guide, it would notbe suitable. Styles should be named to describe theirpurpose.

SummaryStyles help insure a standard look throughout a longdocument and make it much easier to maintain aprofessional look for your writing project. As you haveseen, styles are not difficult to use or customize and they

are a great time saver. Now that you see how easy stylesare, youre ready to put them to work simplifying otheraspects of your project - like automatic table of contentsgeneration, managing indexes, footnotes and endnotes,and bibliographies.

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ResourcesThe examples used in this guide were created with

iWorks Pages. The following references provide specifichow-to information for other word processingapplications.

OpenOffice.orgs Writer User Guide[online, no cost]

iWork 09: The Missing Manual[Amazon, retail $39.99]

Microsoft Word 2007: The Missing Manual[Amazon, retail $29.99]

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac: The Missing Manual

[Amazon, retail $34.99]

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http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/059651431X?ie=UTF8%26tag=scenicsouth-20%26linkCode=as2%26camp=1789%26creative=390957%26creativeASIN=059651431Xhttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/059652739X?ie=UTF8%26tag=scenicsouth-20%26linkCode=as2%26camp=1789%26creative=390957%26creativeASIN=059652739Xhttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596157584?ie=UTF8%26tag=scenicsouth-20%26linkCode=as2%26camp=1789%26creative=390957%26creativeASIN=0596157584http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOo3_User_Guides/Writer_Guide

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AuthorInfo

DeniseBarrettOlson

St.Augustine,Florida

http://moultriecreek.us

Twitter-@moultriecreek

Email-denise@moultriecreek.us

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