How do I understand those tags on the Statusbar?

A number of users have wondered how “Styles” (as contrasted with “styles” and other attributes such as fonts) interact in a Nisus Writer Express document. They also don’t understand how the Tags on the Statusbar can help them.

The various Tags of the Statusbar appear when your selected text has the attributes applied.

Believe it or not, text can have no attributes applied. Such text displays in 12-point Helvetica.

Each tag on the Statusbar controls a different kind of grouped attributes.

Paragraph Style
Character Style
ruler (indents, tabs, alignment, line spacing)
font (font family, typeface, size, variants)
color
highlight

The way a character is displayed is the result of a merging of all the attributes applied.

You can see which attributes are present by looking at the tags on the Statusbar.

Tags override each other moving from right to left.

In other words…
To figure out how some text will display:

1. Take 12-pt Helvetica.
2. Apply to it any Paragraph Style attributes using the Styles palette (which may overide the font).
3. Apply to that a Character Style using the Styles palette.
4. Then apply (i.e. modify) the ruler.
5. Then change the font/size and/or style stuff (i.e. using the Character palette method, not the Styles palette method).
6. Then modify the color.
7. Finally add a little highlighter.

Note that Paragraph and Character Style tags are always visible, they may just be faded if no Style is applied.