How to Tell What Style Text Has


You can see what formatting a region has by placing the cursor where you want and then hitting M-s (the Meta key (Alt or Compose Character) and s key at the same time).

The style you get for newly typed characters obeys rules that are consistent with what Macintosh users expect. The most noticeable difference is:

If you are inserting text at the end of an already stylized region, new text will come up in the region's style. It used to be that you would get plain text in this case. If you don't want this to happen, select the Plainest menu command from the front menu card and continue typing.
The Plainer command is also available so you can add one style and delete one style as you type along. When you execute the Plainer command, it will display the current insertion style in the message line.

Here are the rules EZ follows for determining the current insertion style:

  1. If you are inserting text at the beginning of a paragraph, the style you get will be the style of the text at the beginning of the paragraph, not the style of the previous paragraph. The exception to this is when you have just typed the return key to end a paragraph, in which case the style of the paragraph you just finished will be continued.

  2. Immediately after deleting text, any insertion will be placed in the style of the text that you just deleted. For example in the following text:
    bolditalic
    (where bold is in bold style, and italic in Italic), if you delete the b or d in bold and type you will be typing in bold. If you delete the c before bold or the i after bold and type you will be typing in italic.

  3. If you are neither inserting at the beginning of a paragraph, nor inserting immediately after deleting characters, if you are inserting at the end of a stylized region, you get that region's style.

  4. You can use the Plainer menu command at any time to strip the outermost style off the current insertion style. The new insertion styles will be displayed in the message line.

  5. You can use the Plainest menu command at any time to reset the current insertion style to default.

  6. You can add styles to the current inseriton style by typing keystroke commands (documented elsewhere here). The new insertion styles will be displayed in the message line.