paragraph spacing

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DeanEM.TFAD

How to change spacing before or after a paragraph without changing characters (font, or bold or italic, etc) within the paragraph?  Line spacing is easy to change in Text Properties (F3) [Scribus 1.5.3], but how to change spacing between paragraphs without loading ODT text anew from LibreOffice?

GarryP

Welcome to the forum DeanEM.TFAD.

To change the paragraph before and after spacing you need to be using a paragraph style (PF3) rather than direct formatting.
Styles are easy to set-up and deploy so it's well worth getting used to them.

DeanEM.TFAD

Thanks for your comment.  It's true, but Styles usually also contain a Character Style.  When I apply the Style in the Story Editor, say, it changes all the text in the paragraph to conform to that Character Style, eliminating special bold or italic words.  My question is how to affect the paragraph without modifying the text within.

GarryP

Unfortunately you can't apply a different paragraph style without discarding the already-applied character styles/formatting. When you apply a paragraph style you are saying "Apply this style to all of the text in this paragraph and disregard all previous character formatting." Scribus probably does it this way as the existing character formatting may not be compatible with the newly-applied paragraph style.

For instance, say you have some character formatting that uses a bold font variant. Then you apply a new paragraph style which uses a different font where you have no bold variant. Scribus can't accept the bold character formatting and convert that formatting to a different bold variant because it has no bold variant to apply. Scribus could be smarter in how it does this but it currently isn't.

The trick is to use styles from the start. Create character styles, then create paragraph styles based on the character styles. This way, when you want to make a change, you simply modify the relevant character style and everything is changed automatically.

It sounds like you've imported your text from an ODT file so you might be able to change the styles to do this but it would depend on how the text was imported and what styles were created during the import process. Without having the actual document to experiment with it's difficult to say.

So, the answer is: You can't apply a new paragraph style without losing the character formatting unless your document is set-up in the right way, unfortunately.

P.S. The Story Editor isn't a good place to apply formatting (for the most part). Best to do it directly to the frame on the page via the Properties Palette instead.

DeanEM.TFAD

Thanks.  Your suggestion to generate a small set of relevant Character Styles has been very helpful, avoids having to scroll through long list of fonts, etc., just to embolden or italicize selected words.  Re the between-paragraph spacing issue that motivated my original question, my community newspaper (12 8.5x11 pages) articles are small/simple enough that, where fractional between-paragraph spacing is really needed, to make the changes in LibreOffice and re-import the ODT file.  That's easy.  Better, I'll try to avoid fractional spacings in favor of more uniformity/alignment across columns/pages.   Now on to other challenges!  Thanks!!