Auto-titles and paragraph-character styles

For all things Mellel

Moderators: Eyal Redler, redlers, Ori Redler

Post Reply
jfontana
New to all this
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Jul 01, 2020 9:31 pm

Auto-titles and paragraph-character styles

Post by jfontana »

There's one thing in Mellel I still cannot get my head around and this has to do with the styles work with respect to the auto-titles.

The first thing that is a bit confusing is that the first element in the auto-title sequence corresponds to 'heading 1' but then 'heading 1' is associated to the Title paragraph and character styles. Then 'heading 2' is associated to the 'heading' styles, 'heading 3' to 'heading B' ...

This is causing me problems because when I export a document to the Word format (this was the main reason I upgraded to Mellel 5), Word does not recognize a title as one of its default heading styles and thus it does not incorporate it to the generation of table of contents, outlines, etc.

Then there is a second related problem. That is that I cannot seem to modify the default styles in Mellel. If I change, for instance, the font associated to 'heading', I get a new 'heading' marked with ◆ next to it. This is no longer the main 'heading' style and any additional changes I introduce will only modify this new 'heading' style.

This is also bad for conversions to Word because the different modified Mellel headings are not recognized as headings by MS Word. If I keep the default headings without modifying anything, though, MS Word will recognize all of them except for 'heading 1', since, as I said, that is associated with 'title' and not with any heading paragraph styles.

Am I doing something wrong or this is the way this is intended to work? One should be able to set the default styles to one's liking, right? It is OK to create additional styles for special projects but if every time you want to do something different, it creates a copy of the default style with a ◆ keeping the same name, this gets to be a bit confusing and difficult to manage.

Again, it is very likely that I'm just doing something wrong. This is why I would like to ask for your help in this forum. Thanks very much in advance.


JM
ealvarez
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 130
Joined: Fri Mar 17, 2006 6:44 pm

Re: Auto-titles and paragraph-character styles

Post by ealvarez »

Regarding avoiding “diamonds” with auto-title it’s easy, but maybe not easy to explain by words and English is not my first language:) I’ll try…

1- Select the auto-title
2- Go to the Auto-title tab in the palette, the active auto-title should have been selected automatically
3- Click on the pen (Edit) symbol, a new window will open
4- Select the right auto-title in the left part of the new window.
5- In the right part, you will have a visual of how the title will appear
6- Select the title as you will do for a word (or as if you wished to color the title)
7- Then select the Character or Paragraph tab in the palette and apply a new style with the “little hand”
8- Click “OK”

The style of your auto-title should have changed without the diamonds.

Regarding the problem when exporting to Word, maybe you should ask for support directly from the Redlers. From my experience, they answer fairly rapidly. But, without wishing to be negative, I suspect you will need to redo your title markings in Word.
Amontillado
Knows everything, can prove it
Posts: 148
Joined: Fri May 04, 2018 4:00 am

Re: Auto-titles and paragraph-character styles

Post by Amontillado »

(Hopefully this isn't a duplicate post - I had to go through a login cycle after I wrote this.)

The diamond styles may seem mysterious, but I don't think they need to be. I struggled with Mellel styles initially, then realized I was making mountains out of styled molehills.

What the diamond means is that the style isn't in the style set the document is using. Rather than throw away a style because it doesn't happen to be in your global style set, the style is preserved. Mellel lets you know the style is local to the document with a diamond.

I remember the diamond by alliterative mnemonic. D)iamond styles are D)ocument styles.

The best way to learn about the diamond styles and style sets is by creating styles and style sets, deleting them, opening and closing files, and observing the progression of diamonds.

A diamond style or style set disappears when a) it's no longer in use, and b) you close the file.

Regarding headings and auto-titles, Mellel seems to operate on strict separation of tasks. You create a visual heading by using a paragraph style.

You create a TOC entry by using an auto-title style, which in turn references paragraph styles.

That means you can use your heading styles for things you don't want in your TOC, if you want.
Post Reply