Naming conventions for styles

•Enter a numeric prefix or similar for the style name, that will order them in a logical order. Please note that the styles are listed in alphabetical order in the style list. This order is hardly ever the logical one (kicker, headline, subhead, intro, column head, body and so on).

•In non-articles setup, where you keep all styles in one library, it is recommended to set the same root name for the same class of styles, e.g.. the names of all the headline styles may start with 'Head' and the names of all the body styles may start with 'Body'. Such approach allow some sophisticated testing in macro scripts to be carried out, e.g., if the current style is the headline style, then do something, otherwise, do something else.

In articles-based set up, the styles are typically in different formats, so the naming is simplified.

•Capitalize the style names properly.

•Make styles name unique.

Two styles shall not have the same style name, although the uniqueness is not enforced.

•Prefer short names.

Style names should be not longer than 15 characters, although it is possible to specify even longer names. The reason for this is that only first 15 characters of the name are displayed in Text style toolbar (when collapsed).

Style names may contain any character, including spaces.

Note for script programmers: In the Style object, you cannot use style names, but only tag names.

•Keep them as short as possible.

•Use only lower cases.

•When creating styles for multiple formats, remember that all the tag names of the same class must be equal across the formats, e.g. if you name the style as headline in the first headline format, use the name headline in other formats too.

•For paragraph and character styles use only the tag names that are defined in the XML schema.

•Do not use the reserved name "p" for a tag name - it may interfere with preventing auto-insertion of styles.

Tag names may contain characters, numbers, underlines, ASCII codes from 161 to 255, or any single character. For instance, the valid names are: 'A', 'A0', 'Abc_XXX2', '123', 'àèì' and '-' (one character). Spaces are not allowed in tag names. The length of the tag name is limited to 16 characters. You cannot use the names of the GNML built-in tags or variables for tag names. The tag names must be unique both in the relevant library of styles and in all the libraries of styles that are supposed to be linked to the same format. The tag names are case sensitive.