Organizing and Managing Styles
In Style Designer, you can organize your styles in a hierarchy and then use inherited properties to reduce design and maintenance time. You can create a hierarchy of similar styles, set the style property values once, and have those values inherited by child styles.
The Prototype style, which is essentially the parent style for all styles, allows you to quickly define properties for all styles. This style allows you to make global changes across all styles that inherit properties from the Prototype style. For example, you may have all styles inherit their font and vertical spacing from the Prototype style.
By default, all style properties and options of a parent style are inherited by its child styles. If you change the property or option values of a parent style, those changes are inherited by the child styles of that parent style. You can override specific properties or options for a child style to make those not inherited from its parent style. Once the value of a specific property or option is set at the child level, changes you make to the parent style for that property do not affect the child style.
To organize styles in Style Designer
Open your Stationery design project.
On the View menu, click Style Designer.
Click the type of styles you want to organize, such as Paragraph Styles.
If you want to make a style the child of another style, drag and drop the child style on top of the style you want to make its parent style.
Click on the child style and review the properties for that style to make sure it inherits the property values you want from its parent style.
Editing Several Styles at Once
Sometimes a group of styles needs the same treatment, such as the same font, the same spacing above and below, or the same option value, but the styles do not belong together in a hierarchy and creating a parent style for them would be more structure than the change is worth. Since 2026.1, you can select several styles in Style Designer and set the value once for all of them.
Select styles the way you select files in Windows Explorer. Hold CTRL and click each style you want to include, or click the first style in a run and then hold SHIFT and click the last style in the run. A selection is limited to a single type of style: you can select several paragraph styles together or several character styles together, but not a mixture of the two. When you click a different type of style, Style Designer shows the styles selected for that type instead.
Any value you then set on the Properties, Options, Target Properties, or Target Options tab is applied to every style in the selection.
Where the styles in the selection already agree on a value, Style Designer shows that value. Where they disagree, it shows the field blank rather than displaying the value from one of the styles as though it applied to all of them. A blank field is not itself a change, and nothing is written to your styles until you set a value. When you do, that value is applied to every style in the selection, whether or not the styles agreed beforehand.
Note: The Prototype style is left out of a selection of several styles. Setting a value on Prototype already reaches every style that inherits from it, which is a different action from setting the same value on a specific group of styles. Select Prototype on its own when that is what you want.
To set a value for several styles at once
Open your Stationery design project.
On the View menu, click Style Designer.
Click the type of styles you want to edit, such as Paragraph Styles.
If you want to select styles individually, hold CTRL and click each style you want to include in the selection.
If you want to select a run of styles, click the first style in the run, and then hold SHIFT and click the last style in the run.
Click the Properties, Options, Target Properties, or Target Options tab, and then set the value you want. ePublisher applies the value to every style in the selection.