When you apply a paragraph style, it affects all of the text in the paragraph. You do not have to select the text in the paragraph to apply a paragraph style; you only need to place your cursor in the paragraph and apply the style. The style applies all paragraph and character attributes to the entire paragraph.
New paragraph styles initially inherit the attributes of the browser and the document body style. The first paragraph style added to a new style sheet is marked as the default for the type. Paragraph settings include font, alignment, spacing, padding, and border attributes. See Use Style Editor Tools for more information about formatting a paragraph style.
Tip: If you are applying a style sheet to a web page that was created using content defaults, you may encounter unwanted spaces between paragraphs because the web page contains manually entered hard returns to separate the paragraphs and the default paragraph style includes spacing above and below paragraphs to create the separation. You can either remove the extra hard returns in the web page or remove the spacing in the paragraph style by setting a 0 value for spacing above and below the paragraph.
Authors often create several paragraph styles in their style sheets, one default paragraph style for the main body of their documents and several other styles with different formatting. For example, a paragraph style font inherits an Arial font from the document body style, but you want to create another style that uses a Courier New font in a blue font color to visually differentiate the content when viewed in the Player.
There are other styles that also affect the text in an entire paragraph. They include the heading level styles Heading 1 to Heading 6, Address, Preformatted, and Block Quote. These paragraph-based styles also inherit some formatting attributes from the document body style and browser defined defaults. For example, heading styles inherit the document font from the document body style, but with an adjusted font size inherited from the browser defaults, while preformatted styles inherit the document font size, but not the font.
Note: In the Web Page Editor, you create heading levels, preformatted, and address paragraphs using the Format list and the Block Quote icon to create block quote paragraphs. These controls insert the paragraphs using the default style if one is set in the style sheet or the default formatting for the browser. After creating the paragraph in the web page, you can use the Styles list to change to another style if others exist for that paragraph type.