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Julia Cemer wondered: <<I am in the process of updating our style
guide. As I was researching, I read somewhere that you should document
your paragraph and character tags (we use Frame). Currently, our style
guide lists all the paragraph and character tags and their appropriate
use (Use only after Numbered1 style, etc.). However, what I read seemed
to indicate you should break down exactly what makes up the style (font
size, word spacing, weight, etc).>>
It's a good idea to list the specifics of how the tags should be used,
but probably overkill to include all the style information. The main
reason for doing this in the past was as an emergency measure, in case
you had some major network crash and lost your template; documenting
all these details would let you manually recreate the template from the
description in the style guide. But if you maintain good backups of
your documents, there's little need for this: the information can be
retrieved quickly simply by opening the template.
That being said, there's little harm in completely documenting your
styles if you have time. It's probably more convenient to have this
kind of information available "at a glance" than to have to open each
style in the template to review its parameters. That being said:
<<Does any one have suggestions on the best way to do this?>>
The "best" way always depends on the problem you're trying to solve.
But here's one effective way: present the information in a nicely
formatted table, with one column per parameter (e.g., font = Times New
Roman 12), and the styles nested under headings that help readers
locate the appropriate style (e.g., gather all the headings together,
all the body text styles together, etc.).
Another trick I've done with considerable success in the past is to
present a thumbnail (ca. 1/3 the size of a real page) of a typical page
that contains all the main styles, then use callout arrows to point at
each element of the page, name the style, and summarize its key
attributes. You can simplify the presentation quite a bit if you define
the parent styles (the ones on which others are based) in some detail,
then for all child styles (the ones based on those parents), say "based
on [parent name]", and present only the parameters that change.
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