Styles

After looking at the primary elements of block-level content in a WordprocessingML file, it is now necessary to look at the information stored in the document that affects how this content is displayed.

The first such group of information is styles. Within a WordprocessingML file, styles are predefined sets of paragraph and/or character properties which can be applied to text within the document. This allows the formatting properties to be stored and managed independently from the content, allowing the look of document content to be changed in a single location (e.g., the look of all first-level headings is changed by changing the style with styleId Heading1 rather than looking for and changing each paragraph in the document).

The Normal paragraph style in a word processing document can have any number of formatting properties, e.g., font face = Times New Roman; font size = 12pt; paragraph justification = left). All paragraphs that reference this paragraph style would automatically inherit these properties.