I had just made a central change in base styling. Now it turns out that in many documents I had to re-apply the styling that I changed centrally? Did I do something wrong?
The styling is “inherited” on several levels (see https://help.clausebase.com/kb/overview/).
This means that for some feature X of the styling (e.g., the font name)
- only the central styling defines a setting for feature X, that setting is inherited everywhere…
- … except on those places where you define another setting for that feature X.
For example, if you assign Arial at the central styling level, and Times in a specific document Y, then Arial is simply ignored in that document Y. If then, later on, you change Arial to Verdana at the central level, this will not make any different for document Y, because document Y already contained its own setting.
Does that answer your question?
Makes sense Maarten. I was talking about the situation where you would make a change to the styling (not the central styling and not the as hoc styling) of document Y. If you would change the font type of that styling, and you save the styling, then the styling won’t be applied to document Y anymore or any other document to which the same styling was applied. You will have to apply the styling again to Document Y.
Ah, I see where you’re going.
Indeed, unlike some other parts of ClauseBase, applying the styling in such way will not mean that the styling will be automatically updated in the future. (See https://help.clausebase.com/kb/styling-pane/)
Technically speaking, applying the styling just means that its bundle of features is copied into the document or clause; no further link will be established between the style and the target document/clause.
The reason we took this decision, is mainly that the other approach would nudge users towards over-applying “local” styling, which will lead to manageability issues over time. Such over-applying is currently common practice in MS Word: basically ever user constantly changes the default styling by changing the formatting of text using Word’s toolbar. At the moment you then need to change a setting, you have a problem.
ClauseBase instead tries to nudge you towards minimizing local styling; the majority of the styling should be done at the central level, any deviations should be sparingly used, in order to foster reusability of documents/clauses across departments and/or clients.
This being said, we could optionally introduce a possibility to establish a link between the document and a certain style. If you think this would be useful, please log this as a feature request.
Thanks for the explanation.
I made a feature request.