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See also:
How to improve document formatting
Why do paragraph styles include direct character formatting?
All about style sheets in the Jutoh manual
If Reporting is set to High, you may see a tip showing the percentage of your book's paragraphs that have been formatted directly. That is, by applying separate formatting, such as right-alignment or text size, instead of applying named styles such as 'Body Text' or 'Heading 1'.
Direct formatting leads to automatic style names containing '+' symbols, such as 'Normal + Bold'. You can see these names in the Styles tab of the Formatting Palette as you move through your text.
Direct formatting is not ideal, for a number of reasons:
It's easy for a document to be inconsistently formatted, since if you change your mind about the overall look of your book you're unlikely to remember to consistently update every paragraph in the book. At best, it's going to waste a lot of time. If each paragraph has a named style, on the other hand, you can update the style and all paragraphs formatted with it will automatically update.
Automatic styles tend to proliferate in each document's style sheet, causing unnecessary bloat and making it hard to find styles in the Styles tab.
Style names are used by Jutoh to indicate a variety of things; for example, heading styles can be used to extract titles for use in a table of contents, or you can set all heading styles to suppress hyphenation.
Font formatting applied to text spans can combine in suboptimal ways and cause layout anomalies. Set text size, font name and so on in paragraph styles instead.
Direct formatting makes it difficult to use different style sheets for targeting different kinds of book in the same project, for example ebook and print book.
It's OK to have a little direct formatting, for example small spans of bold and italics, where it would be overkill to set up a special character style.
Note that named styles are not a Jutoh-specific thing. All word processors support named styles, though they may not encourage them as much as they should. Jutoh makes it much clearer than most word processors which of your styles are direct (automatic), and which not, so you can choose to improve the quality of the formatting if you wish.
Here are some ways you can reduce the amount of direct formatting in your project.
Select paragraphs and double-click on named styles in the Styles window, or use the drop-down control in the Tools window.
You can assign keyboard shortcuts to styles to make it even quicker to apply them. You can use the command View | Customise Shortcuts.
Use the Edit | Find and Replace command to replace automatic styles with named styles.
Use the Format | Book | Formatting Cleanup command to remove directly formatted colour, font name and font size from your book.
Use Format | Clear Direct Formatting (Shift+Ctrl+R) to reset character and paragraph formatting. To only reset paragraph direct formatting (for example "Normal + Centre Alignment"), put the text cursor inside the paragraph - don't select any text - and then use this command. You can also use the More | Clear Direct Formatting command in the Formatting Palette. If you select any text, resetting the text formatting will also reset any character formatting, for example any bold or italic spans of text, so use with caution.
Use named styles in the word processor you used to create the book, if you didn't write it in Jutoh originally. Please refer to the documentation of your word processor.
Contents | Start | End | Previous: KB0245: Why does Jutoh warn about line spacing? | Next: KB0247: How do I create a hanging indent?