Styles should default to underlying styles

[GuernseyMan]

Apologies for the length of this post. I want to be sure that I get the problem right. I use styles exclusively, I will never manually override a style. Most of my documents are very long and I can't afford for inconsistant formatting to creep in.

There doesn't seem to be any way to reset part of a style, as an example. If I create two paragraph styles "Red Text" and "Blue Text" and then put a paragraph in each I get figure 1.

Figure 1

Figure 1.PNG (2.4 KiB) Viewed 5882 times

If I then apply the "Strong" character style to two of the words I get figure 2. This is completely expected.

Figure 2

Figure 2.PNG (2.8 KiB) Viewed 5882 times

Now I edit the "Strong" character style to change all the words to green. I get figure 3, again this is expected.

Figure 3

Figure 3.PNG (2.78 KiB) Viewed 5882 times

A bit later in the editing I decide that the Green/Bold is too much so I want to revert to just bold. If I edit the "Strong" character style again there is no way to just reset the font colour to that of the underlying paragraph style (which is how Strong starts out). If I set the font colour to auto then it sets all the strong text to black (presumably looking back to the normal style which is still black).

To me this is counterintuitive. There should be a setting which allows me to specify that font colour, or any other character trait, is the same as the underlying paragraph text rather than either setting a trait or auto (which seems to just reset it to normal). Especially if the style is set as floating.

In this case I know that I can just reset the "Strong" character and I will get what I want (although the black text persists). This is a simple example and usually I've made other changes that I don't want to reset then have to do again.

Hopefully that is clear. I'm not sure how many other users would use styles as much as I do but it is a very good habit to get into.

[SuperTech]

Thanks for reporting this problem but currently resetting this field is not possible. I have forwarded the details to our developer team.

Meanwhile, as a workaround, you can create a new similar Strong1 character style and apply it to the text where you applied Strong before.

[GuernseyMan]

Yes, I that would work.

It's not a major problem, more of an annoyance. One of the things that drew me to Softmaker is that it has much better styles handling than the market leader It just needs a couple of tweaks to be perfect for my purposes.