Deleting font family from character style

[JSJansen]

How do I delete the font-family spec from the definition of a character style?

I have a character style that is defined as "Default Paragraph Font +
Font:Arial Narrow." I want to change that definition to "Default Paragraph
Font + Font:Bold." But when I open the Modify Style dialog box, the drop-down
list for font family does not include (None) or (Default paragraph font) or
anything like that, and if I delete "Arial Narrow" and tab out of the field,
"Arial Narrow" reappears. So it seems to be impossible to delete the font
family from a character-style definition. Is there a way?

(Word 2003)

Jeff Jansen

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Change the font to the same font used for Normal style. This will then
revert to Default Paragraph Font.

 

[JSJansen]

Actually, I tried that, Suzanne, but it doesn't do the trick. The font family
is still a part of the character style definition. So if the Default
Paragraph Font is Arial, and I change the character-style font is Arial, if I
apply that style to a paragraph whose font is Arial, it looks fine, but if I
apply it to a paragraph whose font is Garamond (or anything else), the
character style still appears as Arial, NOT Garamond, which is what I want.
Any other ideas?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The Default Paragraph Font is not the same thing as the font used by Normal.
The DPF is the font defined for a given style. The usual way to remove
specific font or paragraph formatting is to change the formatting to match
that used by the style the given style is based on, but this in fact doesn't
seem to work for character styles. Have you tried deleting the style? That
would reset it to its default Normal.dot formatting (if it's a built-in
style) or allow you to redefine it if it's user-defined.

 

[JSJansen]

Suzanne,

Alas, this is not a built-in character style, so if I delete it, Word will,
if I'm not mistaken, also remove all instances of that style from the
document. So if I were to then recreate the style, I would have to go through
the document and reapply it anew to all previous occurrences.

But, for the record, I did think of a way to accomplish what I want to do:
1) Rename my character style.
2) Create a new character style with the specs I want using the old name.
3) Globally find/replace the renamed style with the recreated style.
4) Delete the renamed style.

Haven't tried it, but conceptually it should work. If it doesn't, I'll
report back.

Thanks.
Jeff Jansen

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Yes, it sounds as though this should work.