Help with Styles/Style Sheets

Question

The area of styles and style sheets has been an immense frustration for me in AW pretty much forever. I'm simply unable to make them work in the way that all the documentation seems to indicate that they should and, worse than that, I seem to be unable to make them consistently fail in the same way from one try to the next.
The most common failing, the one that represents it coming as close to working as I seem to ever see it, is when applying a paragraph style to another selected paragraph and seeing all of the Paragraph but none of the Text formatting coming through: The indenting and line spacing will be changed correctly, and any and all Style info (from Text:Style, I mean) comes through correctly, but no change occurs to the original font or size.
The custom style does display the correct font information, but the 'original' fond style and size don't change.
I can't believe that after all of this time and effort I'm still missing something, but perhaps I am. If anyone could manage to point out just what that is then I'd be eternally grateful.

Answer 1

Thank you for the quick and helpful response.
I'm pretty sure I understand about setting the desired style info and I can usually, but not always, see what I was trying to set up displayed in the Text and Para. Attributes flippies.
Not, however, always. In those cases when the font is displayed, but not the size, then size changes aren't passed along and you'll usually also see other strangeness (see below). The solution for this problem, for me at least, is to repeat the process but this time first change the font to something else and then back to the desired setting; for some reason, this will force it to appear and to work normally, more or less.
A simple way for me to tell whether or not the Styles Window is going to be working as it should is to click on different paragraphs and watch the display in the Styles window. When things are as normal as I think they get, the checkmark will accurately display the style currently assigned to that paragraph; if not, it will not.
When things are working correctly, then style selection works normally and clicking anywhere in a paragraph to be changed, then double-clicking on the desired style in the Styles Window, will result in a proper change to that style (or as well as it can, given the difficulties you see with compound styles and attributes becoming 'stuck').
When not working correctly, OTOH, the whole function is different. Clicking on a paragraph, as mentioned above, won't necessarily correctly indicate the current style for that para., and double-clicking on the new desired style will do nothing at all. Instead, in these cases, you must have the entire paragraph selected before double-clicking on the style desired and, after doing so, you'll see that although para. attributes will seemingly always be changed it's very common (almost the rule, actually) that some or all of the differing text attributes won't be applied, even though they are correctly displayed in the body of the style itself.
I've been about as careful as I can be in setting up and testing all of this and for the life of me can't see clear reasons why outcomes are so different between two identical test documents. There are other oddities, such as the fact that editing of a style via the menu structure works fairly well and as described as long as the Styles Window itself is working correctly, as described above, but gets wildly different results if it is not.
Even when working correctly, it seems to always leave the 'case zero' paragraph, the one that originated the style, unchanged in one way or another; for example, I wound up with a document having four identical paragraphs, all having the same style assigned, and all showing the same style assigned in the Styles Window, but having different appearances: The original style was Bold and, after that was removed in the editing process, the other 3 paragraphs correctly showed normal, i.e., not Bold, font. The first para. continued to be bold, and to show Bold as checked in the menu, even though the Style did not call for it to be.
As in other cases where things got stuck in some way or another, this was cleared by editing again, going into the style menu (Text:Style, I mean), and cycling things. In this case, this meant first selecting Bold, then deselecting it; after that, the lead paragraph displayed correctly.
Those are just a few examples of what I've been seeing and dealing with. It's not the simplest of features but, between the contents of AW > Help and _AW 6: The Missing Manual_ I think I should have a good enough idea of how it works and how to use it. Unfortunately, it just seems to occasionally be wandering off and getting lost.