Cannot create or redefine character styles in Pages 5.6

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Cannot create or redefine character styles in Pages 5.6

I'm trying to create a new character style in Pages 5.6. The text currently has Character Style "None" applied to it. I format the text, select it, go to the Character Styles menu, and when I open it, the "+" is there but is not highlighted blue. When I click it, nothing happens. I was able to do it once, but it stopped working after that. I quit and restarted Pages with no luck. And I'm running Yosemite, Pages 5.6.1. My profile says El Capitan, but I upgraded/reverted to Yosemite.

So, I thought I'd just redefine an existing style as a workaround, but when I try to do that, Redefine Style is greyed out.

I've tried selecting just a word, a whole paragraph, and everything in between, and no luck. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

MacBook Air 13", 10.11

Posted on Feb 19, 2019 1:31 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

cvince

Level 1

8 points

Mar 26, 2019 10:18 PM in response to Glen Schuler

Hi Glen,

I've had this problem for a while and just recently found out what the problem was, on my side at least. Hopefully this helps you too!

What would happen to me is that when I change the formatting of my word(s), Pages would register those as changes to the PARAGRAPH STYLE. And apparently, they only let you redefine/create one type at a time...

Give it another try, and look at the Paragraph Style at the top: is there an * and an "update" label next to it? If so, what I did was add more text in the same paragraph as the text I was formatting, re-apply a default paragraph style, reselect the word (in my case, a link), re-apply the formatting and then the redefine/create new CHARACTER style options finally enabled.

If not, another issue I've seen is that multiple character styles get selected somehow. If the character style menu reads "Multiple", it won't let you redefine/create new styles. Here I would reset both the paragraph style to a default, and the character styles to none, before trying again.

Let me know if that helps!

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Cannot create or redefine character styles in Pages 5.6

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