I’m having trouble understanding the difference between Paragraph styles and Font styles, and why some text items are one and others are the other, and why Paragraph styles have lots more control over the font while Font styles gives you very little control, even though that control is sometimes necessary.
In fact, I don’t know why there are separate categories.
TIA
I guess it’s just evolution. In the beginning Paragraph styles did not exist.
Paragraph styles are for editable literal text to support parameters like alignment, indentation, spacing and color.
Font styles are for musical text items and provides only the font itself, size and style.
The manual says this:
But as Janus mentions it’s an ongoing evolution. The devs have mentioned on the forum that in time they’d like to move more Font styles into Paragraph styles, but that that’s not trivial to achieve. The most recent ones to move were, I believe, the Tempo markings.
In InDesign (which is what they seem to be emulating for most font and layout functions) there are only two categories: Character and Paragraph, and they are nestable, making for some very powerful functions. It also has Grep capabilities, but I think that’s beyond Dorico’s scope.
I would also like to see Object styles, so we could assign character, paragraph, alignment, leading, and margins all in one go to a text frame that we could apply on an object basis that is also copyable. Objects like frames should also be groupable and lockable.
But I digress…
