Inherited Styles

When working with very large publications or publications that require many different styles to be created in order to support subtle style changes, the management of these can quickly get complicated and become time consuming.

Inherited styles provide a simple and efficient way to allow subtle style changes to be created, without having maninatin multiple copies of very similar Article level styles. Duplication of Article styles is generally advised against as the management can become time consuming if global changes are required in the future.

Let’s take a look at a couple of worked examples to demonstrate the value of Inherited Styles:

Worked example 1: The majority of your publication uses a single ‘Default Style’ which in addition to all styling, defines a 5% top padding to the Canvas. This is perfect for most articles as normally the first component on the page is a Headline.

Now you create a new article which requires an image as the first component, the 5% top padding is no longer desirable as it creates unwanted space above the image. By creating an inherited style (ie ‘Default no top canvas padding’) and setting the Canvas top padding value to 0%, it’s possible to remove the top padding but ensure all other styles from the parent style are applied correctly (fonts, colours etc).

The key benefit here is that if in the future you need to make a core style change to the parent style, this change will be automatically inherited by all the ‘Inherited Styles’ that have that style as the parent.

Worked example 2: All articles in your publication use the same font for all text components, you achieve this by creating a ‘Article Style’ named ‘Core Style’. However, you have 12 sections in your magazine and it is a requirement that all Headline and Subtitle text components need to be a different colour.

Using Inherited Styles this can be managed easily. Simply create an Inherited Style for each colour variant (Style-Red, Style-Blue etc) required, then change the colour of the Headline and Subtitle text components in each style. You can then apply the correct Inherited Style to the appropriate article.

While this could be achieved by duplicating the core ‘Article Style’ and changing the text colour for each version, if changes to the core style are required in the future, it would be necessary to make these changes to each style - which is both time consuming and error prone.

Notes:

All components of a ‘Inherited styles’ inherit the properties of its parent style unless otherwise specified / overridden.

Creating an Inherited Style

Navigate to the ‘Style Manager’ from the ‘Styles’ tab
Select the ‘Add New’ option
Enter a Style Name
Under ‘Source’ select ‘Inherit From’
Under ‘Existing Style’ select the style to inherit from
Select ‘Create’
The new Inherited Style will be indicated by the arrow, placed below the Style it inherits from

Editing an Inherited Style

When editing an inherited style for the first time, all properties will appear greyed out. This is because when no value for an inherited style property has been specified, the component ‘inherits’ the value of that property from its parent and so appears greyed out.

When a value is changed (e.g. text size increased, colour changed), it will cause the property to be overridden and will stop inheriting the value from the parent style. You can choose to override as many or as few properties as you need.

In the example above, the ‘Line Height’ property is now overridden and is no longer inherited from the parent style. Remember: if the Subtitle font in the parent style is changed, it will also change in this inherited style.

Reverting an Inherited Style property

It is possible to revert any overridden property by double-clicking on the property name. This will cause the value to be reverted to the value of its parent style.

Applying an Inherited Style

Applying an Inherited Style is the same as applying a regular a style, and can be applied both via the 'Article Manager' and the 'Article Editor':

Access the Article you want to edit. The article builder will load
From the article toolbar, click the style menu (at the top right) and select the style you want to apply
Once the required style has been applied, click outside of the style menu to close the panel
Click 'Save' to apply the style change