BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES

BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES, Microsoft Office developer blog

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:00:11 GMT

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Page Breaks and Paragraph Formats

Kevin Roth — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:47:26 GMT

I wonder if you could comment on how page breaks and paragraph formatting works together? I have a pet peeve with Word formatting that would probably be less "peevy" if I understood why it works this way...

To reproduce (I'm using Word 2003, so maybe this is already fixed in 2007?):

1. Open a new, blank document.

2. Type a line of text in the default Normal style, and press enter.

3. Press Control-Enter to insert a page break.

4. Type a little more text, then

5. Apply a paragraph format that specifies a background color to the paragraph on page 2.

If you now scroll up, you'll see the background color splashed across the "page break" line on page 1, but I really only wanted to color the first paragraph on page 2! Why does it "bleed up" like this?

Thanks,

- Kevin

re: BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES

TechieBird — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:10:26 GMT

A great couple of posts - I hope we'll see more in the future.

I've been around long enough to remember the Word 6.0 Resource Kit which I seem to recall had a similar level of technical detail. Up to Word 2003 the document architecture was similar enough that I've been recycling what I learnt back then ever since... and I had been missing that level of understanding on how Word 2007 documents are put together!

So thank you, thank you, thank you. Even if we never get technical manuals at the level of detail of the old Resource Kits, it's good to know some of the most information is being put in the public domain.

re: BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES

wrdblog — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:58:45 GMT

Hi TechieBird – Thanks for your kind words. Regarding Office Resource Kits…have you checked-out the 2007 Office Resource Kit - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303401.aspx?

- Jonathan Bailor (MS)

re: BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES

Tristan — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:02:05 GMT

@Kevin

This actually happens because the page break, although it ends the page, isn't a paragraph mark, so it's on the same paragraph as the first line on the next page. Therefore, when you apply a paragraph style, it applies to the whole para - including the page break on the previous page.

In Word 2007, we did fix this by automatically inserting a paragraph mark when you add a page break (and allowing that following para mark to sit after the page break, rather than on the next page).

- Tristan

Miscellaneous links for Halloween

Doug Mahugh — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:02:39 GMT

Stephen McGibbon has screenshots of the Open XML and ODF support coming in Windows 7 Wordpad , as announced

re: BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES

Ruth French — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 05:45:32 GMT

My file has borders, which I gather are themes.

When I "saveaspdf" the brdrdot, brdrdashsm, brdrdash, brddash, and brdrdashd do not look very much like they do in the Word 2007 document, but are dotted/dashed. The brdrdb, brdtriple are thick solid lines. Brdrthtnsg look OK. The brdrwavy, brdrwavydb, and brdrdashdotstr totally disappear. And the brdrengrave looks ok.

What can I do to get the pdf file to actually look like the word file.

Of 4 pcs (2 desktops, 2 laptops; 3 XP and 1 Vista; all Office 2007), the problem exists on 3 of the 4. The old XP laptop produced pdf files with good looking borders ... did. My husband started removing things like Civilization, etc., to speed it up, and now the borders don't work any better on that machine than the other 3 machines.

re: BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES

Julie — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 11:04:21 GMT

This short series is beginning to help clarify my understanding of 2007; I was pretty confident with styles and templates in 2003, and I'm finding things just aren't quite working as I expect based on that old understanding--so this is very helpful--although I'm going to have to spend more time mulling it over.

One of the things I've been puzzling over is how the style sets relate to templates. What I'm getting at a first read here is that they're not--so that may have just cleared up a big misunderstanding on my part.

How can I make a style set available to all students, who may log in on any one of a dozen computers? I have a workgroup templates folder on a server (which brings up another peculiarity, but we'll not go into that in this post), so I'd thought I could create a style set "in" a template and it'd be available to all. Now I think I understand why that doesn't work. So--what would be the correct way to do this?

re: BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES

wrdblog — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 03:25:13 GMT

Hi Julie – Here’s a way to make your custom style set and only your custom style set available to all students who may log in on any one of a dozen computers:

- create a custom style set

- have it in use in the template (i.e. pick it as the “active style set”)

- show the styles pane

- click the manage styles button

- click the restrict tab

- check the Block Quick Style Set switching box

- save the template

All documents created from this template will have your custom style set in the Style Gallery and your students won’t be able to change it.

Does this help?

- Jonathan Bailor (MS)

How to Make the Formatting in Your Document Consistent

The Microsoft Office Word Team's Blog — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:52:02 GMT

Note: This post is an extended reply to Ilya's comment on my last post If you've ever worked document

re: BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES

John Federico — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:09:06 GMT

Great series. Would you please also elaborate on numbering in Word 2007. Especially the difference between using a numbered style where the paragraph indents are set by the style vs. right clicking and using "adjust list indents" (which doesn't appear to be handled by styles) and how that affects such things as restarting or continuing numbering. This whole procedure isn't very intuitive. I have also had problems with list styles disconnecting from the associated paragraph/linked styles. Is there some way to set this up to be more stable?

Thanks again. -John

re: BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES

wrdblog — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:38:40 GMT

Hi John - Thanks John. I'm not sure I can do justice to your question in a comment…so I’ll queue it up for a future post. Thanks for the great question.

-Jonathan Bailor (MS)

re: BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES

Janet Schorr (MS) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:41:18 GMT

Ruth -

Thanks for your feedback. I've double-checked all border output to PDF files, and you are correct that the wavy line borders don't display in the PDF files. This is a known issue with our Save as PDF feature, and exists for both page borders and table borders. We don't have a workaround for the issue right now.

The other borders should all be saving to the PDF file correctly, but it may not be obvious at an initial glance. Some of the borders look like a solid line, but if you zoom in, you'll see the actual pattern on-screen; printing the PDF file will also print the borders in the same way that they print from the Word file. The discrepancy between what you see on-screen between the two applications results from a difference in how the applications render lines. Word has a fixed minimum width for displaying lines; anything below this minimum width is displayed wider than it actually is. PDF, on the other hand, does not have a minimum width, so the lines are rendered at the actual width, and what displays on-screen may even vary with the PDF viewer you are using to display the file.

Your best workaround for ensuring that the on-screen display of the PDF matches the on-screen display of the Word document is to increase the line width of the border to 1pt or higher for those borders that are made up of multiple lines.

We haven't made any changes to how we output borders since we released the Save as PDF feature, so I am not sure why you are seeing different results on different machines. However, I suspect that you may have been using a third-party application, such as Adobe Acrobat Pro, to save out your PDF files, and this may have been removed when your husband was removing things from the machine.

re: BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES

Brian — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:18:33 GMT

Why is there absolutely 0 posts about blogging in Word. You've got a whole category devoted to it but not a single post since 06. I'm having a problem trying to open existing posts where it is only showing the last 20 posts and none prior to that when I try and "open existing posts". There seems to be no discussion on blogging from Word anywhere on the web, I would have thought that I would at least find some interesting blogging tips here...

re: BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES

wrdblog — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 02:06:34 GMT

Hi Brian - Check-out: http://blogs.msdn.com/joe_friend/archive/2006/05/12/595963.aspx

- Jonathan Bailor (MS)

re: BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES

Klaus Linke — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:58:11 GMT

> When you keep the Normal Style empty by

> default, this just works because Normal

> text outside of tables gets its properties

> from the Document Defaults, and Normal text

> inside of tables gets its properties from

> the Table Style.

Apart from the fact that you can't customize the Normal paragraph style when you use table styles, that scheme works reasonably well.

One "issue" that remains is that Ctrl+Q (ResetPara) used inside a table resets the paragraphs to the document default settings, not to the table style settings.

So with most built-in table styles (with 0 pt "space after" and single line spacing), Ctrl+Q applies 10 pt after and a 1.15 multiple line spacing.

BTW, you can then use "remove paragraph formatting" in the Styles Inspector to get rid of that... So it seems that the code for ResetPara (Ctrl+Q) may be in need of an overhaul.

- Klaus

re: BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES

Yann — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:06:04 GMT

We have a large number of set templates and I'm trying to set a table style, but for whatever reasons the table even if I have defined paragraph spacing, the default Normal spacing is applied regardless (I've change the Normal default spacing from 12pt after to 12pt before). Any assistance will be much appreaciated.

Thanks

Yann