Styles have a “Parent Style” property. Styles inherit their formatting properties from their parent style. This allows you to create a hierarchy of styles. For example, the built-in styles contain a hierarchy for Declarations, a portion of which looks like this:
Figure 4.10 An example of a style hierarchy.
Formatting properties in a style are combined with the parent style. Thus, the Declare Struct style inherits the formatting properties of the Declaration style. That lets you affect changes to all declaration styles by altering the single Declaration style.
The topmost parent style is the “Default Text” style. Its formatting properties are determined by the document type’s font settings.
You can change the parent style of any style using the Style Properties command.
In the figure below is an example of how styles might combine for a function declaration.
Figure 4.11 Style properties “add up” on top of the default font specified by the document type.