Style Searching

Summary

Styles appear in Sheet entries as line Styles and base Styles.

Styles appear in Heading entries as line Styles only.

Styles refer to other Styles as well, via parent and child Styles, and with a new base Style too.

When QuSheet requires some Style related information, QuSheet searches Styles in a particular order.

First Style looked at depends on the type of Heading or Sheet entry.

A: The style "z reference" no longer exists.

Second Style considered is the line Style (i.e. the Style corresponding to the entry in the Heading or the Sheet).

Third Styles looked at are the ones in the base-style chain: a chain of Styles *ending* with the base Style specified in the Sheet entry but with other base Styles tagged at the front whenever a Heading, with a Style which specifies a new extra base style, is expanded

The last Style looked at is “z default” – the only Style without parent and child Styles, which must provide a default value for all parameters.

Style searching within Styles happens in the following way: first, a parent Style is searched, then the Style itself, then the child Style. The parent and child Styles are also searched in the same way (i.e. parent of parent, child of parent, and so on). Searching Styles in this way finishes as soon as QuSheet encounters a loop. All parent and child Styles point to themselves by default (i.e. to set up a one Style loop).

The parameters controlling background and foreground colours contain some additional Style searching. When looking for one of these parameters QuSheet will, if these are not defined, also look in the Standard group at the Background Colour (“even” lines) parameter and so on. The “even” and “odd” refer to the indentation level for the particular line being displayed.