inadvertent document styles

[silvermoonbeam]

I'm not even sure how to ask this question…

I thought I understood styles, style sets, and their use, and have quite a few of them set up in a long document I've been working on. All has been fine. I went through my character styles last night (Style Sets > Edit Style Sets) and assigned some Open Type features to them (things like ligatures). When I opened the document this morning both my paragraph and character styles menus were populated with numerous styles with a diamond positioned before the name, which means I created a whole bunch of document styles. Why would new styles have been created? I thought I was asking Mellel to add whatever features I selected to an existing style and I thought clicking "Save" would have done that.

Any thoughts about why this happened? What did I miss?

On a related topic, are there any tricks to preserving style variations (italic, bold) when changing the font of a selection? I have a number of book titles and foreign terms in italics and find that when I experiment with different fonts, this formatting vanishes.

Thank you so much! Mellel has been a real joy to work with.

Christopher

[donb]

>menus were populated with numerous styles with a diamond positioned before the name<

I suspect that in the Mellel preferences, you have forgotten to tick the "update document styles" in the Open & Save part of the preferences, so that Mellel does not know that you want your newly altered styles to replace the styles that were there before.
The best thing at present is to go to File > Replace Styles and replace each of the style names that are preceded by diamonds with the same style names that are not preceded with diamonds.

>are there any tricks to preserving style variations (italic, bold) when changing the font of a selection? I have a number of book titles and foreign terms in italics and find that when I experiment with different fonts, this formatting vanishes.<

Two points here. 1) You must make your style variations by using the F keys. The usual command-I, command-B etc. won't carry over when you change fonts.

2) Not all fonts have the same character variations. Some fonts have italics, many others do not. Some have ligatures, many others do not. Some have bold face, some others do not; etc. When you change the font of a formatted text, it often happens that the new font you choose does not have the same character variations availabe. In such a case, the character variation cannot carry over, because the font has no such character variation available.

Unlike some older programs, such as Word, Mellel does not create artificial style variations for fonts which lack them. There's a long discussion of this in my Beginners Tutorial.

Don Broadribb

[silvermoonbeam]

I suspect that in the Mellel preferences, you have forgotten to tick the "update document styles" in the Open & Save part of the preferences, so that Mellel does not know that you want your newly altered styles to replace the styles that were there before.

Yes, this must be it. I had it unchecked.

Two points here. 1) You must make your style variations by using the F keys. The usual command-I, command-B etc. won't carry over when you change fonts.

2) Not all fonts have the same character variations. Some fonts have italics, many others do not.

I do use only the F keys but think when I was testing I forgot to make sure the new font had the necessary variation. Good! This clears everything up. Thank you!