Understanding word style manipulation

To edit your document's styles you can click on the bottom right hand corner of the styles section on the home page.

When manipulating styles the most important thing to note are where styles are referenced. All styles are referenced by id so if you want to change the properties of a style this is quite a simple change and can be done on the specific style node applicable.

So the most obvious place this style could be referenced is inside the document and any headers/footers as you can see in the image below I have a paragraph with the text "Coding Recipes" that is linked to "Demo Style"

There are two other places this style could be referenced. If you look at the style xml is has a "w:basedOn" node pointing to the "Normal" style. It is possible to base a style on any other style so this is another place it could be referenced. The last place is inside the numbering but that is only if your style is linked to a custom number.

By adding a number to my style you can see that the style xml now has some numbering information.

If you used a built in number for your style than you wouldn't have to worry about any other references however if your style was linked to a custom number then a numbering element would get created in numbering.xml and this would have a reference to your style as well as shown in the image below

I'll explain more about numbering in my next post but if you are wondering how the two are referenced you can determine this by finding the w:num element in numbering.xml that has the id "1" (referenced in the w:numid node of the style). You'll then see that numid "1" is linked to abstractNumId "0" which you can see in the image above.