OOo Off the Wall: Building Characters

Character styles are a set of formatting options applied to selected
text. They are a basic tool in most word processors, and
OpenOffice.org's use of character styles is more or less typical. If you
have used character styles in other word processors, then you
probably can grasp the basics of using them in OpenOffice.org with few
difficulties.

If you are a newcomer to styles, imagine that you decide to put the
title of a book in italics. You could enter an override by selecting the
italics icon on the Function bar. However, you can work more efficiently
if you create a character style for italics or book titles, and apply
the style instead. That way, if you decide that all the book
titles in your document should use a bold regular weight instead of
italics, you can update them simultaneously by modifying the style.

As with other word processors' character styles, OpenOffice.org's work
closely with paragraph styles. That is, the basic font of a character
style usually is chosen to match or contrast with a particular paragraph
style's font. Often, too, the character style differs from the paragraph
style only in the font effect, position or background it uses. In fact,
you can think of character styles as a style-based override of a
paragraph. But no matter how you think about them, character and
paragraph styles are a matched pair, by far the most widely used
styles in OpenOffice.org.

What is less obvious and more unusual is that many character styles
play important roles in the automatic functions of OpenOffice.org
Writer, as well as in the export to other formats. Without these
character styles working in the background, much of the convenience of
Writer would be lost.

How do character styles work in Writer? How can you get the most out of
them? When you know the answers to these questions, you'll start to
understand the power of using styles to format your work.
What You Should Know About Character Styles
Character styles in OpenOffice.org have several characteristics that you
should be aware of when using them:

• Character styles do not have a Next Style field on the Organizer tab.
  Character styles generally are applied to selected text in paragraphs
  otherwise formatted with a paragraph style. Under this
  circumstance, specifying the next style makes no
  sense.
• Unlike paragraph styles, character styles have a limited number of
  views available from the drop-down list in the stylist: All, Applied
  Styles, Custom and Hierarchical.
• Character styles in OpenOffice.org are not
  cumulative, as they are in some word processors. In other words, you cannot apply the
  Emphasis character style followed by the Internet Link character style
  to get a format that combines the features of both. If you try, all you
  do is change the format of the selected text from Emphasis to Internet
  Link. Instead, you need to create a third character style that combines
  the characters of both. The quickest way to do this would be to create a
  new character style based on one of the styles and then modify it to use
  the features you want from the second style.

The window for designing a new character
style. Character styles can be hierarchial, so the Linked with field is
available. However, there rarely are used one after another, so there's
no Next Style setting.Pre-Defined Styles
Every now and then, people on the OpenOffice.org users' list asks why so
many styles are pre-defined. They would rather define their own styles,
they say, and grow peevish when they find that they can't delete the
pre-defined ones. However, set the Stylist to the All View and select
the Character Style button, and you'll soon understand why the
pre-defined styles exist and are undeletable.

To start with, many character styles are used automatically by
OpenOffice.org, even though you might not be aware of the fact. For
example, the Bullet style is used for unordered lists and the Numbering
Symbol style for ordered lists. Similarly, Line Number is used whenever
you select Tools -> Line Numbering, and Page Number is used when you select
Insert -> Fields > Page Number. And, when URL Recognition is chosen from
Tools -> AutoCorrect/AutoFormat -> Options, Writer automatically uses
the Internet and Visited Internet Link character styles when
appropriate. You don't need much reflection to realize that if such
character styles were deletable, an anal-retentive user could
cripple Writer in the name of tidiness.

Less obviously, many pre-defined character styles also are mapped to
HTML, XHTML and/or XML tags. For example, the Emphasis character style
maps to the em tag and the Strong Emphasis style to the strong tag.
Other tags mapped to markup languages include Definition (dfn), Example
(sample), Quotation (cite) and Source Text (code). You could export to
a markup language without these styles, but the code would be dependent
on a style sheet and considerably less clean.

Customizing the pre-defined styles, of course, is another matter.
Because they are used automatically, you can format them and forget about them.
What if you prefer not to look at them at all? Make your own character
styles, and select the Custom Styles view in the Stylist. The predefined
styles continue to be applied in the background and are updated by
any changes made to your default paragraph fonts.
Writer comes with pre-defined character
styles. These styles are not only for users' convenience. Most are used
automatically by Writer, which is why you can't delete them.Planning the Styles
For many users, customizing the pre-defined styles is all that is
necessary. In particular, if you are planning to export to MS Office
format, you might want to change the font used by the
Bulleted style. By default, Bulleted uses the StarSymbol font to create
bullets, while MS Office uses MS Symbol. Because of this difference,
bullets often don't translate between the two office suites. If you
create a document for export that uses another font that Windows has
access to, such as Times New Roman, you can avoid this problem.

In addition, the pre-defined character styles do not include several
styles that would be useful to many users, such as a superscript or a small
capital style. Depending on your needs, you might want to create
styles based on any of the other options on the Font Effects, Position
or Background tabs. Don't forget, though, that only one character style
can be applied per selected text block.

As an alternative to character styles, you might consider altering
paragraph styles using conditions. Available only for styles and not for
manual formatting, conditions are not a substitute for character styles
in the middle of a paragraph. However, they are useful replacements for
headings or other short paragraphs, such as table headers or a paragraph
set up for outline numbering. Conditions and outline numbering will be discussed in future columns.
Choosing Fonts for Character Styles
Character styles largely are selections of fonts and font settings.
Unlike FrameMaker, character styles in Writer have no convenient As
Is setting for borrowing attributes from the paragraph in which they are
applied. Because of this lack, you cannot create a single
character style for italics and use it for both body text and a heading
paragraph style of a much larger size. Instead, you have to create
individual character styles for both the body text and heading paragraph
style. The exception is the Default character style, which returns the
selected text to the attributes set in the paragraph style.

Most of the time, the character style should be the same size as the
font for the paragraph style in which it is used. Otherwise, line spacing is
affected for any line on which the character style is used. The easiest
way to ensure that the size is the same is to use the same font, but in
another typeface.

If you do use another font, don't be surprised if it looks bigger or
smaller than the paragraph font even though it is the same size.
Remember that a font's size denotes the amount of vertical height given
to characters, including the empty space around the actual letters. If
one font uses more space around the letters, then the letters that use
the font will be smaller than letters in another font of the same size.

Remember, too, that as with other sorts of design, parsimony is
essential to successful type layout. Only a few years ago, amateur
designers--especially the writers of technical manuals--tended to
overdose on the options offered by digital type and used as many as a
dozen different character styles in a single document. Some technical
manuals would use six or eight different character styles: one for
commands to enter, one for menu items, one for new terms and so on. Not
only was the result a cluttered page, but the conventions nearly were
impossible for readers to remember. Mercifully, this type of overkill
has become rarer as people learned to take the options for granted.
Today, far fewer character styles are used in most cases.

Two conventions that have not died are the tendencies to use bold weights
everywhere and to use a monospaced font such as Courier for commands.
Too frequent use of bold weights makes a page look like a pimply
teenager suffering an outbreak of blackheads. Nor is the appearance
helped by the fact that, in many word processors, bold weights are
simply thickened versions of the regular typeface rather than fonts
specifically designed to accommodate the thickness of the letters. This
appearance is especially common in word processors that cobble together
bold characters on their own rather than using the typefaces that come
with the font. Fortunately, OpenOffice.org does not create its own bold
weights; if a font lacks a bold weight then the regular typeface is
used instead. Still, the over-use of a bold weight is a problem
even in OpenOffice.org. A better solution in a paper document is to use
italics. On-line, try using the same font as for headings, headers and
footers. Because the font is being used already, the result usually is a more
aesthetic page. Often, too, in any media, you can replace any character
style with a word in the paragraph's main font, referring to the File
menu rather than the File menu.

Similarly, the habit of formatting computer commands in a monospaced
font has more tradition behind it than thoughtful design. True, command
lines tend to look better with a monospaced font, especially when
arranging text in columns, as in the output returned for the cal
command. Yet that is no reason that a document has to do the same. The
fact that the most readily available monospaced fonts, such as Courier and
Franklin Gothic, are plain ugly makes the practice even less desirable.
Better monospaced fonts do exist (for instance, see
www.ragnarokpress.com/scriptorium/monospaced.html), but they are
rare, and you should be prepared to pay for most of them.
Character Styles Are Only the Beginning
If you have never used styles before, then character styles are a good
place to start. The application of character styles are straightforward,
and the time save is a benefit that anyone can appreciate. Once you feel
comfortable with character styles in Writer, you will be ready to use
Outline styles in Impress or Cell styles in Calc, both of which are near
equivalents. You'll also be ready to consider paragraph styles, the
other workday styles on which character styles depend.

Bruce Byfield was a manager at Stormix Technologies and Progeny
Linux Systems and a Contributing Editor at Maximum
Linux. Away from his desktop, he listens to punk-folk music, raises
parrots and runs long, painful distances of his own free will. He currently is
writing a book on OpenOffice.org.