Style Inspector

The Style Inspector is located on the Sidebar. It displays all the attributes of the styles (paragraph and character) and any direct formatting present in the paragraph and character where the cursor is located. These details can be useful when you are trying to figure out why some formatting in a document appears to be incorrect or inconsistent.

Direct and Style Formatting

A style is a set of formatting attributes, grouped and identified by a name (the style name). When you apply a style to an object, the object is formatted with the set of attributes of the style. Several objects of same nature can have the same style. As consequence, when you change the set of formatting attributes of the style, all objects associated with the style also change their formatting attributes accordingly. Use styles to uniformly format a large set of paragraphs, cells, and objects and better manage the formatting of documents.

When you do not use styles, and apply formatting attributes to parts of text directly, this is called Direct formatting (also called manual formatting). The formatting is applied only to the selected area of the document. If the document has several paragraphs, frames, or any other object, you apply direct formatting on each object. Direct formatting is available with the Format menu and with the Formatting toolbar.

A direct formatting attribute applied on a object overrides the corresponding attribute of the style applied to the object.

To access this command...

Open the sidebar, click on the Style Inspector icon

Icon Style Inspector on the Sidebar

Press +Alt+5

The Style Inspector Panel

Properties

Paragraph Styles: shows the list of the paragraph styles applied to the text at the cursor position, following the style hierarchy, where the parent style comes above any child style.

Paragraph direct formatting: shows the list of paragraph properties which are set directly to the text at the cursor location.

Character Styles: shows the list of the character styles applied to the text at the cursor, following hierarchy, where the parent style comes above any child style.

Character direct formatting: shows the list of character properties which are set directly to the text at the cursor location.

Values

Display the values of the properties.

Usage

Use the Style Inspector to uncover formatting issues in your text document.

Style properties overwritten by direct formatting are greyed out in the Paragraph and Character style tree, indicating that the style property is not effective anymore.
Paragraph style properties that are re-defined by a child paragraph style are greyed out.
Character style properties that are re-defined by a child character style are greyed out.
Paragraph style and direct properties that are re-defined by character styles or character direct properties are greyed.

For example, if the margins of the paragraph are changed by direct formatting using the rulers, the margins property of the paragraph style are greyed out and the margins properties are displayed in the Paragraph Direct Formatting entry of the Style Inspector.

Another example, if the Emphasis character style highlights a word with a yellow background, and the user mistakenly overwrote it by using a white background, the yellow attribute would be greyed-out and white is listed under Direct Formatting in the Style Inspector. The Style Inspector shows only those attributes that diverge from the parent (which is usually the Default Paragraph Style).

Some features of the Style Inspector are of interest mainly to advanced users:

The Style Inspector can show any hidden RDF (Resource Description Framework, a W3C standard) metadata at the cursor position associated with text spans, paragraphs, and bookmarks. For annotated text spans, “Nested Text Content” item can show the boundary of the nested annotated text ranges and metadata fields.
Custom colour metadata field shadings can be set for an annotated text range or a metadata field, for visualisation of metadata categories in the document editor. Use View - Field Shadings or press +F8 to disable or enable these field shadings.

Release notes for Style Inspector

RDF Metadata in Style Inspector

Custom colour metadata