118 | CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6 Guidebook
Chapter 9: Styles and Style Sets
CorelDRAW provides advanced style
capabilities that allow you to format your
documents with speed, ease, and consistency.
You can create and apply styles and style sets to
a variety of graphic and text objects in your
documents. This chapter introduces you to
different methods of creating and using object
styles in CorelDRAW.
Understanding styles and style sets
If you have worked with desktop-publishing or
word-processing applications, you are most
probably familiar with the concept of styles.
Styles are an indispensable tool for formatting
documents quickly and efficiently. They allow
you to reduce set-up and production time and
create documents with a consistent look.
Imagine that you need to format a multipage
document that contains different objects, such
as paragraph text, artistic text, and graphic
elements. If you have to format the document
without styles, you need to select each
individual object and manually set a number of
attributes. For example, you have to select
every single paragraph and define attributes
such as text alignment, line spacing, and
indentation, in addition to character attributes
such as font type, size, color, font style, and so
on. This process is time-consuming and error-
prone because with so many attributes, it is
easy to miss a setting.
By contrast, if you use styles and style sets, you
can achieve your goal quickly and efficiently.
Styles and style sets are groups of attributes
that determine the appearance of objects in
your documents: graphic objects, artistic and
paragraph text objects, callout and dimension
objects, and any objects created with the
Artistic media tool.While styles define a particular object property,
such as an outline or a fill, style sets, which are
collections of styles, control the overall
appearance of an object.An outline style, for example, defines attributes
such as outline width, color, and type of line; a
character style specifies attributes such as font
type, font style and size, text color and
background color, character position, caps,
and more.A style set, for example, can consist of a fill
style and an outline style that you can apply to
graphic objects such as rectangles, ellipses,
and curves.Start by creating styles and style sets that
define the appearance of each object in your
document. First, create a text style set,
consisting of a paragraph style and a character
style, to control the appearance of body text.Next, design separate paragraph styles for
headings, or character styles for specific words
that you want to highlight. For example, you
can define a character style for your company
name, so it stands out from the body text.Then, add outline and fill styles to define the
appearance of graphic elements, or if you want