I went 'round and 'round with character styles a few years ago and finally swore them off. But brace yourself--the word on the channel is that character styles are fixed now. If this is your first experience with news about Word being fixed, have at it! I'm going to sit this one out, and listen for grassroots reports.

What drove me to swear and foreswear character formats was their inscrutable behavior--I could get intermittent cooperative behavior from character styles, but only by using fiddly undocumented techniques (mucking around in VBA or WordBasic, IIRC). Character styles seemed to lack the guts needed to stand up to the power of paragraph styles. They simply were not robust, unless one was using them as data tags. I wouldn't have considered handing off a document with problem character styles, not after my experiences, unless my job was being outsourced or something dire.

I could have easily (and probably did) let exasperation drive me to extremes like 16-point chartreuse Verdana, having done all my monkey science on the problems only to end up at the same stupid place, struggling to wring any cooperation at all from my character styles.

The strong impression they made on me at the time was that I was seeing paragraph styles overriding character styles. That isn't such a bad theory even for the problem you've described.

But here's a more edified take.

On the techwr-l mailing list, we were recently sniffing at another "difficult feature" (oxymoron alert) in Word, and it has things in common with the style-related problem you're describing: instead of character styles, the object under the 'scope this time is numbered lists which, as everyone who uses them knows, often blow their brains out, unless you set them up an manage the style-based-on properties very strictly according to rules that one would have to be the Word Whisperer to know about at all.

The general idea is that lists use underlying templates that get boggled (technical term) if you don't do the style-based-on part with superstitious precision. Do it wrong and experience endless thankless hassles in list numbering purgatory. Do it right and validate the testimonials to Word's bulletproof rock solid dependable and predictable list numbering.

I don't know, but would not be surprised if your character style boondoggle comes from a similar style definition problem. Google techwr-l list template Jonathan West and follow the thread back (it is only a handful of posts) to Stuart Burnfield's suggestions. He and Jonathan both recommended an MVP web site (it has an illuminating article on this topic). Stuart also suggested MVP web site of Shauna Kelly, where you can find a very promising procedure for avoiding List Template corruption. Maybe you can penetrate the point of Shauna's procedure and how it straightens out List Templates, and then you can try adapting it to character styles.

Anyway, there seem to be strong currents on the MVP sites nowadays, they're getting good information from somewhere and using it to take on some of the real knee-biters that working in Word brings on.

This all seems rather auspicious, doesn't it? Maybe character styles really are fixed?!

Lemme know if you want help finding this material. It is worth tracking down, a real high-water mark in Word troubleshooting.

Please share what you learn, and VBA code if you come by lines that clear up any sort of snafu with styles.

G'luck.

--Ned

Given the lack of feedback on this (although I realize it's only been a few days), one might think that this is an isolated occurrence. I wanted to chime in with the fact that I experience this same issue with my company's Word-based documentation. Unfortunately, the only fix I've come up with is to re-create each document on my own.

You mention that copy-paste carries the formatting with it. After I discovered that fact, I found that pasting into Notepad and then re-copying the text will wipe out the annoyingly persistent formatting. Not exactly a good solution for large-scale docs, but it's all I've managed so far. I'll be hoping someone else comes up with a more usable idea for both our sakes!