Recommended paragraph styles

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Paragraph styles determine the base typeface that’s used in a paragraph, line spacing, indentations, borders, and background colors.

Professional authoring tools also let you control automatic hyphenation and page breaks in various ways.

Important: Not all authoring tools support all settings. If your authoring tool doesn’t support a particular setting that we recommend, simply ignore this setting.

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General recommendations

Provide as few paragraph styles as possible. A clearly written document doesn’t need many different styles.

Create styles only for tagging particular types of information (see Create styles semantically).

For all paragraph styles:

When configuring paragraph properties, add space before paragraphs rather than after paragraphs.

If you mix space before and space after paragraphs, some authoring tools only use the larger space and ignore the smaller space. Other authoring tools sum up both spaces. In either case, the total distance between two paragraphs is hard to control due to the large number of possible combinations.

In practice, it’s not always possible to avoid having space after paragraphs in all cases, but at least try to avoid it if you can. This may save you a lot of trouble.

Don’t ignore the settings for orphan lines and widow lines.
If your authoring tool supports it, set orphan control and widow control to a value of 2 for all paragraph styles.

Orphan control specifies the minimum number of lines in a paragraph before a page break. If the number of lines at the end of the page is less than the specified number of lines, the paragraph is automatically shifted to the next page.

Widow control specifies the minimum number of lines in a paragraph after a page break. If the number of lines at the beginning of the new page is less than the specified number of lines, the position of the break is automatically adjusted.

Overview of recommended styles

The basic paragraph styles needed for every user assistance document are:

Purpose

Suggested style names

Suggested keyboard shortcuts

Headings:

heading level 1

heading level 2

heading level 3

For details, see:
Heading paragraph styles.

 

h1

h2

h3

 

[Alt]+[Shift]+[1]

[Alt]+[Shift]+[2]

[Alt]+[Shift]+[3]

Subheadings:

subheading that introduces a static section (always visible)

subheading that introduces an expandable section (toggle)

For details, see:
Subheading paragraph styles

 

ss_subhead_static
 

se_subhead_expandable

 

[Alt]+[Shift]+[u]

[Alt]+[Shift]+[e]

Body text:

standard paragraph

For details, see:
Body text paragraph style

 

bo_body

 

[Alt]+[Shift]+[o]

Procedures:

paragraph that introduces a procedure

step of a procedure
(with number)

indented first-level paragraph in a procedure (without number)

For details, see:
Procedure paragraph styles

 

pi_procedure_intro
 

ps_procedure_step
 

pp_procedure_plain
 

 

[Alt]+[Shift]+[p]
 

[Alt]+[Shift]+[s]
 


 

Lists:

paragraph that introduces a
list

first-level item of a list
(with bullet)

indented first-level paragraph in a list (without bullet)

second-level item of a list
(with bullet)

indented second-level paragraph in a list (without bullet)

For details, see:
List paragraph styles

 

li_list_intro
 

l1_list_level1_bullet
 

l1p_list_level1_plain
 

l2_list_level2_bullet
 

l2p_list_level2_plain
 

 

[Alt]+[Shift]+[l]
 

[Alt]+[Shift]+[b]
 


 


 


 

Annotations: Tips

For details, see:
Note and warning paragraph styles

at_tip

[Alt]+[Shift]+[t]

Annotations: Notes

standard note

important note

For details, see:
Note and warning paragraph styles

 

an_note

ai_important

 

[Alt]+[Shift]+[n]

[Alt]+[Shift]+[i]

Annotations: Warnings

caution

warning

danger

For details, see:
Note and warning paragraph styles

 

ac_caution

aw_warning

ad_danger

 

[Alt]+[Shift]+[c]

[Alt]+[Shift]+[w]

[Alt]+[Shift]+[d]

You can organize the styles hierarchically as follows:


Automate line breaks and page breaks

Create styles semantically

Create styles hierarchically

Use color with care

Think ahead about printing

Choosing fonts and spacing

Recommended table styles

Recommended character styles