Subject: Re: pruning "redundant" properties while editing
From: Randy Kramer (rhkramer@fast.net)
Date: Wed Mar 14 2001 - 10:00:25 CST
Pierre Abbat wrote:
> Would it be possible for the char props to have a "default" value, which would
> be whatever was set for the style?
Looking back at the question that Martin Sevior posed: "How do I turn
off a specific attribute so that it is inherited from the previous span,
paragraph or section?" and Pierre's question above, I just wanted to
chip in and say that, after some experimentation, I believe Word97 does
let you, in essence, delete a specific attribute.
I have a screen shot of what I went through to prove that to myself
which I can provide if anyone is interested (as a zipped .bmp file).
If you have, as in Pierre's example below, a paragraph with heading 1
style, and a word within that paragraph with an extra attribute which is
not part of (or in addition to) the normal attributes of that style, you
can select that one particular word, and reapply the heading 1 style.
You will then get a dialog with the question "Do you want to:" with two
radio button choices:
-Update the style to reflect recent changes? <the default, which I don't
like -- now your underlying styles start to change -- I like my styles
to stay fixed unless I explicity change them -- there are some other
options that, depending on the setting, will automatically change your
styles -- not a good thing, IMHO>
-Reapply the formatting of the style to the selection?
If you choose the second, the extra attribute is removed (or the
attribute is restored to the default value -- I don't really know what
happens inside the file (or "piece table" if Word has one), the result
is the same).
Aside: A checkbox on that same dialog, "Automatically update the style
from now on", is one of those options that I alluded to above -- not a
good thing.
Second aside: You don't always get the dialog I mentioned, but I can't
tell you what controls when you do and when you don't. When I tried
this experiment earlier today, I did not get the dialog, but I got the
desired result -- the attribute was removed (or the default style of
Heading 1 was reapplied). When I retried it while writing this email
(twice) I did get the dialog (both times). I can't imagine what I
changed to cause a different result (I didn't try to change anything).
-
Let's say you had the following:
> <p style="Heading1">Late one <c props="font-size:default">morning</c> in the <c
> props="font-size:15pt">middle</c> of the night</p>
> and you changed the font-size of Heading1 to 15. Everything would be 15. You
> then change it to 14 and "middle" is still 15. You change "middle" to default
> and it's 14. You change "morning" to 14 and nothing visibly changes. You then
> change Heading1 to 16 and "morning" is still 14 while "middle", being default,
> is now 16 along with the rest.
>
> phma
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