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Using object styles

Object styles benefit your design efforts in much the same way as text styles and color schemes. Once you’ve come up with a set of attributes that you like—properties like line color, fill, border, and so on—you can save this cluster of attributes as a named style. PagePlus remembers which objects are using that style, and the style appears in the Styles tab, and can subsequently be applied to new objects. For example a Quick Star can have a stone effect applied via an object style you’ve saved previously (all object styles use a cog shape as the default object preview type).

Here’s how object styles work to your advantage:

• Each object style can include settings for a host of object attributes, such as line color, line style, fill, transparency, filter effects, font, and border. The freedom to include or exclude certain attributes, and the nearly unlimited range of choices for each attribute, makes this a powerful tool in the designer’s arsenal.

• Any time you want to alter some aspect of a style (for example, change the line color), you simply change the style definition. Instantly, all objects in your publication sharing that style update accordingly.

• Object styles you’ve saved globally appear not only in the original publication but in any new publication, so you can reuse exactly the same attractive combination of attributes for any subsequent design effort.

The Styles tab contains multiple galleries of pre-designed styles that you can apply to any object, or customize to suit your own taste! Galleries exist in effect categories such as Blurs, 3D, Edge, Warps, Shadows, Materials (e.g., metals) and more, with each category having further subcategories.

To apply an object style to one or more objects:

1. Display the Styles tab.

2. Expand the drop-down menu to select a named style category (e.g., Blurs), then pick a subcategory by scrolling the lower window.

3. Preview available styles as thumbnails (cog shapes are shown by default) in the window.

4. Click a style thumbnail to apply it to the selected object(s).

The Object Styles Manager can be used to add or delete categories or subcategories. You can even change the display order of categories, subcategories or thumbnails themselves.

To add, remove, and reorder style categories:

1. Select the tab’s  Tab Menu button and choose Object Styles Manager… from the flyout menu.

2. Use the Add, Remove, Up, or Down buttons as appropriate in each window.

To remove an object style from a gallery:

• Right-click the thumbnail and choose Delete. You’ll be presented with a confirmation dialog each time you delete a style. To bypass confirmation, right-click any thumbnail and uncheck Confirm on Delete.

Deleting a style doesn’t affect the appearance of existing objects using that style, but they are no longer linked to any style. You can unlink an individual object from its style without deleting the style itself—for example, if you intend to update the style but leave a particular object as it is.

To unlink an object from its style definition:

• Right-click the object and choose Format>Object Style>Unlink.

• Changing an object property that’s included in its style definition also unlinks the object from the style. For example, if Fill is one of the attributes included in the style, and you alter the object’s fill color, the object will no longer be linked to the style. You can safely edit properties that are not part of the style without affecting the linkage.

If you’ve applied a style to an object but have lost track of the thumbnail—or want to confirm which style is actually being used on an object—you can quickly locate the thumbnail from the object.

To locate an object’s style in the Styles tab:

• Right-click the object and choose Format>Object Style>Locate in Studio.

The Styles tab displays the gallery thumbnail for the object’s style.

Normally, a publication’s object styles are just stored locally—that is, as part of that publication; they don’t automatically carry over to new publications. If you’ve created a new style you’ll want to use in another publication, you can save it globally so that it will appear in the Styles tab each time you open a new publication.

Saving Object Styles

To create a new object style based on an existing object’s attributes:

1. Right-click the object and choose Format>Object Style>Create.

The Style Attributes Editor dialog appears, with a tree listing object attributes on the left and a preview region on the right (not shown).

 

2. Click to expand or collapse sections within the attributes tree. Check any attributes you want to include in the style definition, and uncheck any you don’t want to include.

3. If you want to change any of the current object settings, double-click an attribute (or select it and click the Edit button). This will bring up a detailed dialog for the particular attribute.

4. The Object pane in the preview region shows the currently selected object after applying the defined style. Select the Artistic Text or Frame Text tab to see the style applied to sample objects of those types.

5. Click the Browse… button to select the gallery category where you want to locate the style thumbnail, and optionally, save to a different Preview Type (Rounded Rectangle, Frame Text, or Artistic Text) instead of the default cog shape.

6. Type a name to identify the gallery thumbnail.

7. Click OK. A thumbnail for the new object style appears in the designated gallery.

Once an object style is listed in a gallery, you can modify it or create a copy (for example, to define a derivative style) by right-clicking on its thumbnail and choosing Edit… or Copy….

To save a publication’s object styles globally:

1. Choose Save Defaults… from the Tools menu.

2. From the dialog, check Object styles, then click Save.

Using object styles