List Overrides

[MatthiasVDE]

Can someone explain in clear words what the exact purpose is of List Overrides, and how they work?
I'm struggling for months with this functionality, and I still don't know what it exactly does...

Extra question: How can you change the color of your header numbering in the stylesheet? I can select some colors in the edit level options, but only a few, not the complete RGB pallet.

[MatthiasVDE]

Additional question 2: Do you need to define those lists on stylesheet level, or do they only work directly on the template?

[PeteC]

No one replied - did you solve you extra question of how to change the header number colour?

What I have noticed is that the supplied Numbered Heading style sheet starts with custom colours for the numbered headings. Once changed to a non-custom colour then Custom disappears. So custom colours do seem to be possible but how can they be done? I've tried exporting the style sheet, modifying in Word and re-importing it, but that had no effect.

I want to make output from EA match the corporate style, for which I need to define a specific font colour.

[PeteC]

So I have found a way to modify the list colours:

• Change the font colour for the headings to something that won't be used as a colour elsewhere in the document stylesheet (e.g. yellow)
• Export the stylesheet as an RTF file
• Open the RTF in a text editor (Notepad++ worked well)
• Near the top is a section starting "{\colortbl ". There are lots of colours defined as RGB colours. The first is number 1.
• Further down in the document is another section starting "{\*\listoverridetable". Within this are several lines of the form "{\listlevel\levelnfc0\levelfollow0\levelstartat1{\leveltext \'01\'00}{\levelnumbers \'01}\f1\fcs1\f1\af1\fcs0\rtlch\f1\af1\ltrch\fs28\b\cf2}", one per heading level. In my case they are in heading number order from Heading 1 to Heading 9.
• The last parameter, cf, defines the colour. In this case cf2 is the second colour in the colortbl section.
• For each heading you want to change the colour of, note the cf value and go back to the colortbl and modify the RGB colours. So in my case I modified the red, green and blue colours for the second set of numbers to the colours I wanted. As a check, the RGB colours should match the colour you chose prior to export.
• Repeat for each heading level you want to change. I thought I could just change the cf parameters to refer to one of the colour definitions (I happened to have headings defined in more than one colour - if I had made them all the same then I would probably only have needed to changed one colour definition), but that didn't seem to work when I tried it, so I ended up with several definitions of the same colour.
• Re-import the RTF into your stylesheet (I also double checked it in Word to see if it looked correct).

As an aside, if you re-export it from EA, there is only one definition of each colour and all the headings then refer to that one definition, so EA has removed the duplication in colour definitions.

I can't exactly answer your question 2, but once these have been defined in a stylesheet, when that is applied to a template at the time of documnent generation then the stylesheet defines the format of the headings. I don't know if you could do the same directly in a template (but given the hassle in defining them it feels better that it's done once in a stylesheet).