Regular Italic not displaying

[gguthrie]

I am new to Mellel and have produced a fifty page document. Regular character style was defined with GentiumAlt font and the paragraph regular style was oriented to the regular character style; also, I have been using the Fkey method of doing variables, and italic was displaying correctly.

Today I changed the regular character style to another font. This of course changed the font in all the paragraphes of the manuscript. When I changed back to GentiumAlt, the little window at the top reads Regular (Base). If I highlight a word and press F3, the window says it has changed to italic, but the highlighted word does not display as italic. I can get other character styles (which also use GentiumAlt) to display as italic, but no longer will the Regular style do so.

What gives?

[donb]

<Today I changed the regular character style to another font... If I highlight a word and press F3, the window says it has changed to italic, but the highlighted word does not display as italic>

I have been unable to reproduce the problem with texts of my own. Since GentiumAlt has only the two faces, regular and italic, it sounds like in the course of using the other font you inadvertently redefined variation C (=F3) to something other than italic.

In any event, you should be able to get back to your original by going in the Finder to User/Library/Application Support/Mellel/Backup and opening the backup copy of your document which you will find there.

Don Broadribb

[gguthrie]

Thanks, Don.

One more bit of information: I actually have several of my main character styles (as well as the "Regular" para. style) showing up with diamonds next to them at the bottom of the style lists. No plus or minus sign. Just diamonds to the left. Why is this?

[nicka]

The diamond means 'document style', that is, a style that is in the current document, but not in the style set that you are using -- see around p. 154 of the Mellel manual.

[gguthrie]

Nicka,

That is what confuses me. The names and settings are exactly the same in both cases. Regular is listed as part of the style set but is also listed as a style with a diamond to the left. The same is the case with three other styles--same name in the regular set and down below with diamonds to the left.

GHG

[nicka]

I don't know what's causing that, but I know what I would try to fix it: I would try using File>Replace styles... to replace the diamond styles with their non-diamond counterparts.

[gguthrie]

Nicka,

Thanks for the help. I finally figured out what precipitated the problem of multiple versions of my styles showing up: changing and replacing certain character styles in the document when there were paragraph styles still associated with the old character styles. So my Regular paragraph style may have been associated with a Regular character style, but I had changed or replaced the Regular character style with something else in the document.

In the end, I set up all my styles just the way I wanted them (I had to replace "Regular" as a character style with something that would allow me to italicize the text--still not sure why that quit working), and then I replaced all of the old styles with the new. This worked brilliantly.

For the time being I have disassociated all of my paragraph styles from specific character styles. If I need to do a global change of font, I can create a new paragraph style, associate it with a specific font, and do a replace.

Thanks again for the help.

GHG