There are a number of style sheets and Pathway combines these using a process called cascading to create a style sheet for the resulting publication (or draft).

Editing Platform

When the content is edited by FieldWorks or Paratext, these applications give a style sheet along with the content. Frequently this style sheet contains styles that represent what the user of the application is hoping each of the fields (sequence of characters) will look like in the resulting publication. This style sheet may or may not contain any information about how the page will (should) be formatted. Typically with Paratext, all projects use the usfm.sty style sheet. FieldWorks gives the user more control over their style sheet.

Best Practice

Pathway allows the style sheet given by the application to be combined with a “Best Practices” style sheet. Pathway provides a range of these style sheets. Typically these style sheet might over ride all the styles in the Editing Platform style sheet so that the publication will follow a standard set of styles.

Feature Related

The style sheets provided by Pathway are actually organized into parts of style sheets (Feature related snippets) that when combined (concatenated) together can give a complete style sheet. So if a number of properties on the style sheet need to be combined to give a particular header, all the related properties will be kept together. This allows the header to be modified in one place even if it is used in a number of “Best Practice” style sheets.

Regional

Pathway allows a particular region to make up a style sheet that represents a publication style they would like in their region (or that is supported by the publishing specialists at the publishing service used in the region).

Custom

Pathway allows technical publications staff (or technically oriented users) to create custom style sheets that can be used in a language project over and over.

See also: Pathway Style Sheet Properties

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