Coming rather late to the party, but reasons I often use character styles
include:
1. They always stay applied when you change paragraph style, instead of
possibly being wiped, dependent on how much direct formatting was applied
(over 50% and it's hosed, I think).
2. They allow you to apply more complex font changes than just bold or
italic or a change of size as one package - particularly useful for special
fonts for "computer text" quotes, for instance.
3. They allow you to combine formatting with "no proofing" (or indeed other
language formatting) as one package - useful for "computer text" again.
4. They allow you to separate semantic from appearance - useful if you might
get a House Style change late in production, and find you have to modify
appearance of all your italicised titles, but not your italicised
parameters, for instance.
One annoying feature is that if you apply a character style to a field, it
doesn't automatically add the "MERGEFORMAT" flag (direct formatting
generally does) - though Charformat would generally be more appropriate for
references anyway.
I am really, really pleased about the restore character style - that's been
on my wish list for a while - and also the more sensible ways of removing
styles in 2007. May not be enough to get me past the ribbon though.
--
Margaret Aldis - Microsoft Word MVP
Syntagma partnership site:
http://www.syntagma.co.uk
Word MVP FAQ site:
http://www.word.mvps.org
"srd" wrote in message
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Although I use paragraph styles religiously, I have never used character
styles. Is there anything to be gained generally by using them, or do
users invoke them only for special purposes?
Stephen R. Diamond