Organize text styles through inheritance

Coming from another design tool, you may be used to setting font, size, weight, and color together on each text layer. A font change then means finding all the relevant layers again. Updating one section takes care to preserve heading sizes and caption colors, and copied content may carry settings that need adjusting in its new location.

Saved text styles help manage those settings centrally. But when text shares only a font while size, weight, and color vary, bundling the properties together means maintaining several combinations. The same font choice ends up repeated across multiple text styles.

In Figalt, text styles follow the parent–child hierarchy. Unset properties come from the parent; explicit settings override inherited values. Inheritance passes through intermediate nodes regardless of their type.

Put shared settings on a common parent

When a section shares a font, set that font on its common parent. A heading that needs a larger size and heavier weight can set those two properties itself. Changing the shared font then updates both heading and body, while the heading keeps its size and weight.

Properties inherit independently. Setting Size on a node does not require it to set Font, Color, or Line as well. Those properties still come from the parent, through however many intermediate nodes there are.

The panel shows what this node sets

The typography section may contain a few rows or none. It lists the current node’s explicit settings, rather than every value affecting its text. Missing properties come from the parent. If no ancestor sets a property, the document’s root style supplies it, followed by shared defaults.

A value equal to the parent’s value is still an independent setting. That node will keep it when the parent changes the property later.

In the layers panel, a text marker before the visibility button identifies a layer with its own text style overrides. Inherited styles do not receive a marker.

Delete a property to follow the parent again

Remove the heading’s Size property when it should use the inherited size again. Typing the same number as the parent does not restore inheritance. Neither does entering zero: zero remains an explicit value.

To change a whole section, find the node holding its shared settings. If one node does not follow the change, check its own overrides. The hierarchy determines where a style comes from; the node’s own settings preserve the differences.