If, for example, I had a paragraph in style Heading 1 and the text was 'The sinking of the Titanic' and I applied Heading 2 to that paragraph, then you'd expect the Titanic to retain its italics.

The general rule is that if you apply a paragraph style to a paragraph then direct formatting (like italic) will be retained where it covers less than half the text in the paragraph, and rejected when it covers more than half (Figures 2 and 3). What happens when you apply a paragraph style to a paragraph that already has direct formatting? On top of the paragraph style, you can apply additional formatting, like bold or italics or pink or small caps to the words that need them (Figure 1). It also stores instructions about font formatting (bold, italics, colour, superscript etc). The words 'King Lear' have direct italic formatting applied.Įvery paragraph has a paragraph style attached to it, whether you like it or not.Ī paragraph style not only stores instructions about paragraphs (indents, line spacing etc). Figure 1: The paragraph style applied to this text has the font defined as Times New Roman, 11pt, not bold and not italics.