Suggestion: 'copy style' and 'paste style' tools/function

[calzen]

Currently, in order to apply a new paragraph or character style to a selection, you need to change a pick list value. This is tedious when you need to apply the same style repeatedly to many different selections.

Suggestion: add functionality that allows copying the style applied to one selection and pasting to another; include keyboard shortcuts

A few applications that implement this are:

MS Word - the 'format painter' tool
Apple Pages - 'copy style' and 'paste style' in the 'Format' menu
Adobe InDesign - the 'eyedropper' tool

Consider this example, where the paragraphs have a paragraph style, and I want to format the 'step x:' text one way, and certain other words another way:

Step 1: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Ut a sapien. Aliquam aliquet purus molestie dolor. Integer quis eros ut erat posuere dictum. Special words. Integer orci. Fusce vulputate lacus at ipsum. Quisque in libero nec mi laoreet volutpat. Aliquam eros pede, scelerisque quis, tristique cursus, placerat convallis, velit. Nam condimentum. Nulla ut mauris. Curabitur adipiscing, mauris non dictum aliquam, arcu risus dapibus diam, nec sollicitudin quam erat quis ligula. Aenean massa nulla, volutpat eu, accumsan et, fringilla eget, odio. Nulla placerat More special words.porta justo. Nulla vitae turpis. Praesent lacus.
Step 2: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Quisque vel erat eget diam consectetuer iaculis. Cras ante velit, suscipit et, porta tempus, dignissim quis, magna. Vivamus viverra, turpis nec rhoncus ultricies, diam turpis eleifend nisl, a eleifend ante felis ac sapien. Integer bibendum. Suspendisse in mi non neque bibendum convallis. Suspendisse potenti. Sed sit amet purus at felis adipiscing aliquam. Vivamus et nisl sit amet mauris aliquet molestie. Integer tortor massa, aliquam a, lacinia nonummy, sagittis nec, eros. Nunc non mauris id eros venenatis adipiscing. Cras et lectus ut nisl pharetra ornare. Yet more special words.Proin leo risus, elementum eget, ultrices vitae, molestie sed, erat. Curabitur et lectus in tellus egestas hendrerit. Sed dapibus ipsum. Quisque sit amet ligula. Suspendisse odio dolor, semper id, feugiat quis, sodales id, mauris. Curabitur id ligula ac libero malesuada pharetra.
Step 3: Nulla facilisi. Nam varius ante dignissim arcu. Suspendisse molestie dignissim neque. Suspendisse leo ipsum, rutrum cursus, malesuada id, dapibus sed, urna. Fusce sollicitudin laoreet diam. Mauris eu quam eget nulla fermentum adipiscing. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Morbi ut odio vitae Special words.eros luctus luctus. Ut diam. Phasellus ullamcorper arcu vitae wisi. Pellentesque urna odio, varius eget, dignissim quis, vehicula placerat, nunc. Ut nec metus quis nulla posuere eleifend.
...etc

Sure, I can just bold and italicise each instance rather than applying a character style. But I'm not sure yet if I want to bold, italicise, maybe even change colour or case, etc, so I have a character style for the 'step' words and a different character style for the 'special words'.

In Pages, I can manually set the style for the first 'step' to my custom character style, and:

1) click into the word(s) that I've just set style
2) press keyboard shortcut for Copy Style
3) select the next text I want to apply the style to
4) press keyboard shortcut for Paste Style -- character style is now applied to that text
5) repeat 3 and 4 till done