4. The Screen Setup of PhotoLine
4.34 The Text Styles
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. The first
style is always No Style. If you assign it to a text, a previous style
assignment is cancelled.
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.