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4. The Screen Setup of PhotoLine

## 4.32 The Text Style Dialog

Text Styles are used to give long texts a uniform look.

A text style stores the information how to format text. There are two types of text styles:

- Character Styles
Character styles contain the settings defining the appearance of text like font, size, color and so on. Character styles can be applied to single characters and to text blocks.
- Paragraph Styles
Paragraph styles contain all settings of character styles. Additionally they store the paragraph settings like line and paragraph distance, left and right edge and so on. Paragraph styles are always applied to whole paragraphs.

If a style was assigned to a text, the text stores the style name. Whenever the text style is modified later, every text with that style will automatically be modified, too.

Text styles can be created hierarchically. A new style can inherit most of properties of an existing one and differ only by some settings. If the base text style is modified, the inheriting text style will take all setting inherited from the base style.

Text styles are saved within the document file. Aside from the document text style list there is a global one which can be used with every new document. If a text style is used the first time in a new document, the global text style list will be copied to the document and future text style operations will work with the local copy.

The text style dialog is structured in three parts. At the left there is a list of the existing text styles. The names of the styles are user-defined.

Beside that there is a description of the active text style. Base styles, that don‘t inherit from any other style, show a complete description of all settings. Descended styles only show the name of the base style and the differing settings.

At the bottom there are available commands:

- New...
New... creates a new text style using the text settings of the current text position.
Style Name is the name of the new text style. Based On can be used to define a base text style. Next Style is the name of the text style, that will automatically be applied to a newly created paragraph. If Insert Globally is activated, the new text style will be inserted in the global text style list. At the bottom there is a description of the new text style.
- Update
The settings of a style can‘t be edited directly. Instead a text has to be formatted accordingly and then those settings can be copied to a text style by using Update.
- Edit
Edit allows to modify the common information like style name, base style and the next style.
- Duplicate
Duplicate creates a copy of the active text style.
- Delete
Delete deletes the active text style. Any text using that style won‘t have a style afterwards.
- Apply
Apply applies the active text style to the selected text. Double-clicking a style name has the same effect.
By applying a style every custom formatting of the text is replaced by the settings of the text style. Holding the Shift-key while assigning the text will keep the current settings.