Modifying styles in Silas.dot

[JimH]

A couple of users have asked about changing the styles in Silas.dot,
such as to make text in the Quote/Poetry styles be italic and without
any hanging indent. Here's what I said to one user:

SILAS replaces the styles that come out of Paratext with his own
versions, because in some ways the Paratext ones are inadequate. (For
example, section headings as they come out of Paratext don't have the
attribute "keep-with-next" turned on, so a section heading can occur
as the last line of a page.) Also, the styles in SILAS are
hierarchical, reaching back to the most basic, "_Vernacular_Base". So
the macro to change font only needs to change the font of that style,
and all the other vernacular text styles get their font from that one.
Similarly, all the heading styles are based on "_Heading_Base", and
get the attributes "Centered" and "Keep with next" from that style.

You can see from the table below how each of the q# styles is formed.
The first line is the style name, the second shows what it is based
on, and the third shows what is added to that base to make the style
in this row. So for the style that comes from \q, "q - Poetry - Indent
Level 1 - Single Level Only", it is based on "_BodyText_Base", and it
is made by adding Indent: Before: 3.1 mm, Hanging: 12.4 mm.

q - Poetry - Indent Level 1 - Single Level Only
_BodyText_Base
_BodyText_Base + Indent: Before: 3.1 mm, Hanging: 12.4 mm, Left-to-
right

q1 - Poetry - Indent Level 1
q - Poetry - Indent Level 1 - Single Level Only
q - Poetry - Indent Level 1 - Single Level Only + Left-to-right

q2 - Poetry - Indent Level 2
q1 - Poetry - Indent Level 1
q1 - Poetry - Indent Level 1 + Indent: Hanging: 9.3 mm, Left-to-
right, Space Before: 0 pt

q3 - Poetry - Indent Level 3
q2 - Poetry - Indent Level 2
q2 - Poetry - Indent Level 2 + Indent: Hanging: 6.2 mm, Left-to-right

q4 - Poetry - Indent Level 4
q3 - Poetry - Indent Level 3
q3 - Poetry - Indent Level 3 + Indent: Hanging: 3.1 mm, Left-to-right

You'll also notice from the table that each of the q# styles is based
on the previous one, so if you change the most basic of them to
italic, that will ripple through to the others. Each of the others in
the range q2 to q4 has its own hanging indent, so you'll need to
change each of them.

To find out how to change these styles to give the formatting that you
want, open the Frequently Asked Questions file that is installed with
SILAS, and search for the question "How can I change the appearance of
the printouts?". I suggest you make a text file that lists the styles
that you change, and the changes that you make to each one, so that
when you install a new version of SILAS, you can make those changes
again in the new version.

I hope that helps you make SILAS behave the way you want. If not,
please write again.

Jim