WHY did styles change? [A quick overview of how styles work]
 

This seems to be a "bright idea" on someone's part.

I for one liked style chaining: elegant, and it "did what you want".

So level styles are now permitted, which is good. Two questions:

1. When I open up a new outline, by default there is a "Heading 1", "Heading 2", and "Heading 3", but only ONE "Level 1". Which are the level styles? How to use them?

2. I may have a style in an existing outline that I would love to use in my new outline (or perhaps in a template). How do I apply this to the Level/Heading style? Does "Copy Style" really work? I've found the mileage to vary considerably.

Thank you very much for wonderful product you've produced. More information about the changes in each build would be appreciated.

Sorry for not responding sooner. While we felt style chaining was a powerful feature, it was quite clear from feedback that it was too confusing to use as a replacement for everything. That is why we brought back structural level styles while still keeping style chaining. We also added an option for propagating custom styles to the next row to solve issues such as using row numbering. However, while working with this, a number of bugs and ugly situations were discovered when style chaining was involved that would lead to massive confusion. Styles in OmniOutliner 3 has always been a point of confusion for many users and we really wanted to address that. As a result, we decided to keep it very simple and remove style chaining. All there is are structural styles and named styles. There's no longer the possibility of a level 1 row controlling the style of a level 5 decedent of that row. There's no longer the possibility of a row unexpectantly specifying the style of the next peer due to style chaining. This does make more complicated style formatting harder as it is a more manual process, but we will be evaluating this and looking at ways to solve these that do not involve making the style system more complex. If you've looked at OmniOutliner 2 for iPad, you'll see we've added a style theming feature which will apply the structural styles from a template to the current document. We will be adding this to OmniOutliner 4 and is one way that we're trying to make styling more powerful while keeping a style system that is easy to understand.

[QUOTE=brygoose;127804]
So level styles are now permitted, which is good. Two questions:

1. When I open up a new outline, by default there is a "Heading 1", "Heading 2", and "Heading 3", but only ONE "Level 1". Which are the level styles? How to use them?
[/QUOTE]
The heading named styles are simply predefined named styles that could be applied to individual rows to make them headings. If they are of no use to you, then I would recommend deleting them from the default template. Level styles are not named styles. Level styles are structural styles that live in the top part of the Styles section of the sidebar. Structural styles exist for the whole document, column titles, levels, notes, and columns. The number of level styles shown will match the deepest level that existed in the document for that session or for whatever has a style defined. That is, if you want to set a level 6 styles but only have 3 levels currently, you can make the level 6 style appear by creating a level 6 row in the document. At this point you can delete those rows and the level 6 style will still be visible in the sidebar until you reopen the file. If you apply style attributes to the level 6 row, it will remain visible in the sidebar even after reopening the file. Named styles are simply a saved collection of style attributes. They will not be automatically applied to anything unless done so due to that named style being applied to a structural style.

[IMG]http://people.omnigroup.com/dmo/images/styles.png[/IMG]

[QUOTE=brygoose;127804]
2. I may have a style in an existing outline that I would love to use in my new outline (or perhaps in a template). How do I apply this to the Level/Heading style? Does "Copy Style" really work? I've found the mileage to vary considerably.
[/QUOTE]
Copy style does work but does have issues with it. You can drag the name style from the sidebar to the sidebar in another document. Style theming will also make this simple if you actually want it to look like the other document, not just grabbing a single style out of it.

Thank you so much!
 

I really appreciate the explanation, sans help documentation (which is of course missing, since you're still developing OO$).

Keep up the great work,

Bryan

Keyboard shortcuts and named styles
 

I can't seem to find a way to associate function keys to named styles as we used to be able to do, even in earlier builds of OO4.

Is this on the drawing board?

Bryan

Those were not intentionally taken away

For the time being this should be a sticky!

Thank you - it clears up a lot of things for me,

David