Intro to styles

What are styles?

Most people are used to writing documents according to physical attributes. For example, to format a title you might specify the font family, font size, and weight (for example: Helvetica 18pt, bold). This technique that most people use, and we used so far in this course is called direct formatting.

On the other hand, using styles means that you stop saying "font size 14pt, Times New Roman, bold, centered" and you start saying just "Title" because you have defined the "Title" style to have those characteristics.

In other words, using styles means that you shift the emphasis from what the text (or page, or other element) looks like, to what the text is.

A style is a set of formats that you can apply to selected pages, text, and other elements in your document to quickly change their appearance. Often applying a style means applying a whole group of formats at the same time.

Why use styles?

Styles help improve consistency in a document. They also make major formatting changes easy. For example, you might decide to change the indentation of all paragraphs or change the font of all titles. For a long document, this simple task can require making individual changes in dozens of places. By contrast, when you use styles, you only need to make a single change.

Style categories

LibreOffice Writer has five style categories:

• Paragraph styles affect entire paragraphs represented with those styles.
• Character styles affect a block of text inside a paragraph.
• Page styles affect page formatting (page size, margin, and the like).
• Frame styles affect frames and graphics.
• List styles affect outlines, numbered lists, and bulleted lists.

In the same way that characters are the building blocks for creating words, paragraphs are the building blocks of every document. Headings and subheadings are paragraphs; headers, footers, and numbered lists are also paragraphs. Paragraph styles are, therefore, the most frequently used styles and are the ones treated in most detail in this lesson.