Modify and Create Styles

The true power of using styles is the ability to modify or update predefined styles according to your needs and to create new custom styles for your documents.

Modifying styles

To quickly modify an existing paragraph style:

Click anywhere inside the paragraph. Make sure the current style is displayed in the Styles List button on the toolbar. Let's for example modify the Text Body Style.

Format your paragraph according to what you want it to look. Change line spacing, indents, paragraph spacing, alignment etc. To format characters properties of paragraph you must select all the text inside the paragraph. Change font, size, bold, italic, color etc.

Then click on the update style button to update the style. The modified style is then updated on all Text-Body paragraphs. 

The Edit Paragraph Styles Window

For more control and options you can use the Edit Paragraph Style window. To open this window right click anywhere in a paragraph and select Edit Paragraph Style from the context menu.

This command displays the Paragraph Style Window. The current style is displayed on the Name field in Organizer Tab.

Navigate through the tabs to change paragraph and character formatting options for a selected style. Notice a style has always a parent style from which it inherits properties. A style also has a Next style which is the default style when creating a new paragraph after.

When you update a style in Writer this affects only the current document. New or existing documents will keep the default properties for each style.

Creating new custom style

Instead of modifying the defaults you may want to add some new styles. You can do this by using either the Style dialog or the New Style from Selection tool.

Creating a new style using the Style dialog

To create a new style using the Style dialog:

Right-click to the parent style in the Styles and Formatting window. Select New from the pop-up menu. Alternatively you can use the New style button from the Formating toolbar.

In the Organizer tab type a name for your new custom style. The dialogs and choices are the same for defining new styles and for modifying existing styles.

Once a new style has been created it is added to the list of available styles for the document you can apply it to other paragraphs the same way as with predefined styles.

Creating a new style from a selection

You can create a new style by copying an existing manual format you have already applied to a paragraph. For example you can create a new paragraph style with background color.

Click in the document where you want to copy the style from, for example, in a paragraph that you applied manual formatting to.

Click the arrow next to the New Style from Selection icon and choose New Style from Selection from the submenu.

Type a name in the Style Name box. The list box below shows the names of existing custom styles of the selected type

Dragging and dropping to create a style

You can also drag and drop a formated selection into the Styles and Formatting window to create a new style.

Modify or delete a custom style

To modify or delete a custom style right click on a style to open the context menu and choose Delete. Note that you can't delete predefined styles. The same way you can modify any style in your document.