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Font properties of table styles versus paragraph styles
This note was provoked by a thread in another newsgroup complaining
that font properties in table styles don't override those of the paragraph styles in the tables. I do not intend to "excuse" the behavior (if any excuse is needed), merely to supply a coherent explanation for the behavior. Here is my current hypothesis on the internal mechanisms behind the seemingly-odd behavior of table styles versus paragraph styles. I think that this hypothesis explains the observed behavior in a simple way. The "seemingly-odd behavior" is that font properties specified in table styles will only override font properties specified in paragraph styles if the paragraph styles call for unmodified 12-point TNR. Let's look at "font name"; the other properties each work similarly. When Word needs to decide how to display some piece of text that is in a table, Word first starts looking at the paragraph style hierarchy, using exactly the same process that it would use if the text were not in a table. It starts with the paragraph style of the paragraph in the table, and looks to see whether that style overrides the font name of the base style or not. If it does override, then that font name is the answer, and Word displays the text in that font and stops looking. If it does not override, Word looks back at the base style to see whether that overrides the font name. It keeps doing this all the way down the inheritance chain. If nothing overrides, Word eventually gets down to Normal style. Here is the trick; I will claim that Normal style is actually a derived style based on something I will call Internal Normal. So Word looks to see whether Normal overrides Internal Normal or not, just as in all the previous cases. If Normal also says that it does not override, then Word looks at the table style hierarchy to see whether it overrides font name, and continues down that hierarchy until it either finds an override or reaches the base of that tree. The base of that tree is Table Normal, which has the same 12-point TNR as Internal Normal. (Why do I think that Normal style is actually a derived style? I adopt this hypothesis because it seems consistent with Word's behavior, and because it would be an easy implementation. For explaining Word's behavior this hypothesis explains in a natural and consistent way the odd-seeming fact that table style font name will only be effective if all of the paragraph styles including Normal do not modify the default 12-point TNR style. Other explanations require odd special-casing to explain this fact. In terms of easy implementation, Normal can be copied, modified, or have an alias just like any other style, and the other styles are all derived styles. The only internal special-casing required is that Word does not display the "internal normal" style in the style list.) (In the first paragraph I said "the paragraph style"; actually Word does all the usual things; it looks at direct formatting if any, then at the style of the paragraph that you applied directly if any, then at the paragraph style of the paragraph that the table is contained in, and so on.) Bob S |
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