Episode: 1335
Title: HPR1335: LibreOffice 11 Writer Character Styles
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1335/hpr1335.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:41:33

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Hello.
This is Ahuka.
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio and for another and our ongoing series on Libra Office focusing
for the moment on Libra Office writer.
So we have covered actually a fair amount of territory.
If you think about it, we talked about templates.
We introduced the topic of styles.
We looked at paragraph styles in particular.
We've got the styles and formatting window anchored on the left side of our screen.
And the very first tab was the paragraph styles tab.
And within that we took a look at actual paragraphs and headings and tabs.
The other paragraph level set of styles we might want to talk about is lists.
But Libra Office writer treats those as a kind of a separate category because they can
be very complex and have a lot of special configuring.
But the second tab is something called character styles.
And character styles are at a lower level than paragraph styles and let you tweak bits
of text within a paragraph while leaving the rest of the paragraph in its usual state.
Why would you want to do this?
Well, let's start with what Libra Office writer says in their documentation.
Jean is a technical writer from Australia.
She learned the value of character styles after her publisher told her to unbold menu paths
in her 200 page book.
Jean had not used character styles.
She had to edit all 200 pages by hand with some help from find and replace.
This was the last time Jean failed to use character styles.
So that's one of the reasons right there.
Another example, corporate documents where say a company name is supposed to be rendered
in a certain font and style, having a character style for that makes it a lot easier.
But the true master goes much deeper.
We all use character styles in a bad way every day.
Three of them, in fact, bold, italic and underlined.
Every word processor has those seductively easy buttons at the top of the screen.
And so I want to make this bold, I just click the bold button.
And that's what is referred to as manual formatting or direct format.
It is the wrong way to do things.
I hope by the end of this program, I will have convinced you that it's the wrong way to do things.
But if you think about it, these are all cases where a bit of text within the paragraph
gets special formatting while leaving the rest of the paragraph in its normal state.
It's kind of the definition of character level styles.
Now, the first clue might come from the web.
And I've often drawn that parallel between web tags and HTML and CSS and how those relate to what we're doing here.
So let's take a look at that.
The early versions of HTML in the very early days were quite happy to use tags for bold and italic.
B and I, but you don't see that now.
It's really been deprecated in the code and deprecated is a fancy word for saying you really shouldn't do this.
Please stop doing it.
So instead of bold, we use a tag called strong.
It amounts to the same thing.
And then M is the other tag short for emphasize in place of italic.
Now, all these tags normally have the appearance you would expect, but all of it can be changed by what you put in the style sheet.
So if I wanted strong to be more than just, for instance, let's say I wanted strong to be not just that it was bold, but a specific color.
And maybe I want to change what they call it.
If I use the strong tag, I can just define in the style sheet how that works.
And you know, you can change an entire website in just a moment by changing the style sheet if you set it up properly.
So if you want to see what I'm talking about, check out the CSS Zen Garden site, which we've talked about before, which is at
www.csszenn.com.
It's a great example of how switching style sheets can change the appearance of a site without changing any of the content at all.
Now, let's think about a long document in which you have made things bold, italic, or underlined by clicking on buttons as you go.
And then you are asked to change, for instance, all of the bold to italic for whatever reason.
Maybe it's like the example I used a few programs back working on the college catalog.
Some vice president says, ah, I want to change this.
How are you going to do that?
You know, if you're going to try and use find and replace it, you're going to run into problems.
There's no easy way to do that.
You might find yourself crawling through the entire document one page at a time to find and change all of the bold characters.
But if you have created character styles for this, and you have assigned a character style logically, all you need to do is change the style definition in your document, and you can do that in seconds.
Now, another example comes up frequently is technical documentation.
With this kind of writing, you very often need to have like a consistent style for the past to a file or a style for code snippets.
Now, you can do a lot of that at the paragraph level by having a paragraph style.
But it can be very handy to have character styles available for when you need to incorporate a brief reference into a paragraph.
Without having to end that paragraph and start a new one just to put that little reference in, you can use character styles to have some words appear in a different color or have a shaded background.
So this is a very versatile technique and you really want to use it.
So built-in character styles.
Now, this is the stuff that comes with Libra Office in what I'm calling the out-of-the-box experience.
And this isn't all of them necessarily, but it gives you a good flavor of this.
First one is bullets.
How are the bullets themselves look?
Caption characters.
You want to put a caption on images that you've included in your document.
You can have those look a little bit different, have a different font or whatever for those.
Definition, if you're going to be defining terms in technical writing, that's the sort of thing that does come up.
Have a distinct style for your definitions.
Dropcaps.
The initial capital letter of a paragraph can extend below the lines instead of above it.
This is not something you want to do all the time, but when you want to do it, it's an interesting effect.
A lot of the old medieval manuscripts used that.
Emphasis.
OK, now take a look at this one.
Emphasis.
Remember we were talking about the EM tag and HTML for emphasized?
Well, take a look at this.
Emphasis makes things italic.
Just like the web style we mentioned above.
End notes, foot notes, OK?
Those are things that you might want to use in a longer document in particular to incorporate some additional information.
Links, page numbers, quotations, strong emphasis.
This is the equivalent to the web tag strong and it makes characters bold and so on.
There's a bunch of them.
Applying them is pretty easy.
OK, so you've got your styles and formatting window open and docked at the left hand side of the screen, or I will fill you.
And you have the character styles tab.
That's the second one selected.
Click on the word you want to apply the style to.
Your insertion mark can be anywhere in the word.
It doesn't matter.
Then double click on the style to apply it.
Or if you want to just do it to a single character or to multiple words, select the text and then double click the style.
And then when you're done, if you want to go back, you double click on default, which is near the top of the list, and that gets you back to your default character styles.
Now, I would say the best way to get to know all of this stuff.
Spend 20 or 30 minutes, bring up a document, and just start playing with it experimenting.
And when you do that, you're going to notice something.
Some of these styles look the same.
Let me give you an example.
The emphasis style makes things italic.
The variable style makes things italic.
They look identical.
Why would you use both of them if they have the same appearance?
And there is a good reason.
The reason is they serve a different function within your document.
The style variable is one of what you would want to use while discussing coding.
And you would want all of your variables to use this style.
And if you had assigned the logical descriptor variable instead of emphasis, you could at some point say, no, I want to change just my variables without changing everything else in the document.
It was in italics.
It would just change the ones that were variable.
Or if you decided to change your style of emphasis, the variables would be left alone.
Now, the other thing you may run into, if you're experimenting, some styles may not work properly.
I noticed, for instance, the drop caps style did not seem to do anything at all.
And when I went into modify, modify is the way to just take a look at everything that's in there, as well as change it.
What I needed to do was go to the position tab, click on subscript, remove the check mark in the automatic box,
change the font size to 100% and the raise lower by to 17%.
That seemed to do the trick for me.
You can play around and see how that works.
But if a style isn't doing what you think it should be doing, modify it.
So how do we create or modify styles, character styles?
Pretty easy.
It really follows the same kind of procedures with paragraph styles.
You need to have the styles and formatting window open.
Select a style, right click on it and choose modify.
Or if you want to create a brand new style, right click anywhere in the window and choose new to create a new style.
Now, the options here are simpler than they are for the paragraph styles because all you're doing is setting a text appearance.
On the first tab, the organizer, you have the name and possible link to another style.
Then you get the font, font effects, position and background.
As a reminder, remember that styles are contained in templates.
So if you are creating or modifying styles that you want to have permanently available,
make sure you're editing your default template.
Or if you're doing this for a particular type of document,
you may want to create a template specifically for that purpose.
So example, we notice that the bold can be done using the strong emphasis character style.
And we saw that a talc can be done using the emphasis character style.
But what you don't see with the built-in character styles,
you don't see anything for underline.
So let's create one piece of cake.
Go to file templates, edit and select your default template.
And that will open up. Now you can go ahead and create this and it'll always be there.
Then with the character style tab open on the styles and formatting window on the left,
right click and select new.
On the organizer tab, give it the name underline.
As before, do not link it to any other styles.
Now for the font, what I selected is the one that I used normally for all my documents anyway,
which is liberation serif, normal 12 point.
So by selecting that, everything is consistent.
Now for font effects, I select a single underline,
leave my position normal and no background fill.
Click OK and style is created.
So pretty darn easy.
Now suppose you have a particular, one of the things I mentioned before,
you have a corporate style that says that the company name should always be in a certain font
and look a certain way and create a character style for that.
And so anywhere you are in the document, you need to put in the company name.
You can just click that character style and the way you go.
Now, when you start to understand the power of these styles,
you probably create or modify more of them to meet your needs.
There's just so many things you can do with them.
But for now, let's take a look at what the LibreOffice writer team says in their documentation.
Because they say something that you really want to study and understand
if you're going to become a master of this stuff.
The first point they make never mixed character styles and manual formatting.
OK, manual formatting is what happens when you start clicking buttons.
And to me, when I see people open up a word processor and start clicking buttons,
the thing that immediately comes to my mind is this person has no idea what they're doing.
Do that.
So you don't, don't mix them.
All right, if you're just dead set against ever using character styles,
then all right, go ahead, hurt yourself and just do manual formatting.
But don't mix them.
Manual formatting supersedes character styles.
So if you had selected a particular character style and then you click one of those silly buttons,
the button will override the style you've chosen.
And what happens if you combine them is, you know, you're trying to change something
and you don't know why your particular characters are looking the way they look.
What, you know, was it something in the style?
Was it was it some button?
You just don't know.
You can waste hours trying to figure out why isn't this stuff working right now.
There is a technique to clear direct formatting.
If you just right click and select clear direct formatting, that removes manual formatting.
But it does not remove character styles.
So if you had assigned a character style and you didn't like that,
what you need to do is you need to select a different character style.
And that would be the default character style.
Default takes it back to nothing applied, basically.
Realize that clicking the bold icon in the toolbar is not easier than double clicking on a character style
that is preset for bolting the font typeface.
It's not.
It's just you're used to doing it.
But believe me, what you need to do if you want to become the real ninja master of word processing
is you need to have that styles and formatting window open docked on the left.
I keep emphasizing that and just get used to getting your styles out of there.
And if you do that consistently, it will make your life so much easier.
And so and that was the last thing that the Libra Office writer team says,
leave the styles and formatting window open to make character styles easy to access.
And if you've got it docked on the left, it will always be there.
And that's the way to do it.
So I'm going to wrap this up now by saying repeat one more time.
If you're using the bold italic or underlying buttons,
which is what they mean by direct formatting or manual formatting, you are doing it wrong.
Are there any questions?
Well, anyway, thanks a lot.
This is a hookah.
I'm going to wrap up this one.
And I'm going to remind everyone as I always do.
Please do not forget to support free software.
All of us have an obligation there.
Thank you.
Bye.
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