Changing text color in a Heading style

[JohnHind]

I cannot quite put my finger on it, but I find Xara's user interface incredibly unintuitive and its help, though extensive, incredibly unhelpful! I keep encountering basic things I cannot figure out even after reading screeds of documentation and tutorials. Sometimes Google finds the answer in some third party blog or Youtube tutorial, but sometimes I'm still stumped! And when I have figured the thing out, next time I cannot remember because it is just so damn unintuitive!

The latest is this:

Apply the style "Heading 2" or "Heading 3" to a piece of text. It is styled with an absurdly faint shade of grey which barely shows either on screen or when printed. Select the text and click on a better colour on the colour toolbar. This change appears to be registered because the style changes to "Heading 2+" and the selected colour is marked in the toolbar even if you de-select and re-select the text. But the text is ignoring this setting and stubbornly remains a lighter shade of anaemic! Now select some text with "Normal Text" style and change the colour of that and it works just as expected! Plus select that text, select "update other style to match", select the "Heading 2" style and now it works as expected too and it is possible to make further changes to the colour of the original heading. Trouble is you have to laboriously re-establish all the other elements of the "Heading 2" style manually! There is no conceptual difference I can see between the "Heading" styles and the "Normal text" style, so why do they behave so differently?

So frustrating as I can see that Xara is a really powerful program behind that obscurantist, inconsistent and just damn odd user interface!

[Egg Bramhill]

Welcome to TG John.

Xara default text styles are normally black & not linked to other styles. It sounds to me that the template you're using has been altered. Could you attach the web/xar file that's displaying these issues?

[angelize]

The other possibility that comes to mind is possibly the text area is too small for your heading, select the text and with the text tool, click and drag the corner of the text area to enlarge it. you may need to drag downward.

The default heading styles have included a bit of space before and after the paragraph. These can be adjusted on the info bar and your altered style saved as a new custom one.

[JohnHind]

The other possibility that comes to mind is possibly the text area is too small for your heading, select the text and with the text tool, click and drag the corner of the text area to enlarge it. you may need to drag downward.

The prize goes to Angelize! Thanks, that was it. V. confusing though! The box looked big enough, but the bounding box is much smaller than the handles would suggest. When I edited the style I had not restored the padding around the text paragraph and of course this made it small enough to fit so the problem vanished!

Perhaps my remaining complaint is this: the document was actually printed to paper with the grey text! Maybe reasonable to grey it as an on-screen warning (though I can think of better ways), but surely if you ignore this warning, it should just print as specified even if that means overlapping something else or getting clipped by the page edge?

That was a nice Sunday afternoon's headbanging!

[Egg Bramhill]

Well done Frances, you understood the issue better than me