NotesRichTextStyle: Setting Bold, Font Size, and Colour in Code (and STYLE_NO_CHANGE)

You’re appending text into Body span by span with NotesRichTextItem, and now you want the heading span to be bold, two sizes bigger, in blue. The question is — when you append text, where does the “style” come from?

The answer is NotesRichTextStyle. Its definition is just “Represents rich text attributes” — a bundle of “how the text should look” (bold, size, colour, font…). You build a style, set the attributes you want, then apply it to the rich text. This piece also clears up a design that’s easy to misread at first: STYLE_NO_CHANGE.

TL;DR

• Create with session.CreateRichTextStyle()
• Properties (read-write): Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeThrough, Effects, FontSize, NotesColor, NotesFont, PassThruHTML
• Key: a freshly created style has every property at STYLE_NO_CHANGE — meaning “leave this alone.” You set only the ones you want to change and the rest stay untouched
• Apply with NotesRichTextItem.AppendStyle(style) (text appended afterward uses it) or NotesRichTextRange’s SetStyle(style) (applies to a selected range)
• IsDefault (read-only): whether all attributes are still at the default state
• No methods — it’s just a bundle of properties

Create and configure

Create it from NotesSession, then set the properties you want:

Dim session As New NotesSession
Dim style As NotesRichTextStyle
Set style = session.CreateRichTextStyle()
style.Bold = True
style.FontSize = 14

Its properties cover the usual text formatting:

It has no methods — it’s purely a property container.

The key idea: STYLE_NO_CHANGE

This is the design to grasp first. The docs are explicit: right after CreateRichTextStyle(), every property’s value is STYLE_NO_CHANGE.

STYLE_NO_CHANGE means “don’t touch this attribute.” So a property like Bold is actually tri-state, not a plain True/False:

• True — make it bold
• False — make it not bold
• STYLE_NO_CHANGE (default) — don’t touch bold, leave it as-is

This is genuinely useful: if you want to “only enlarge the text and not touch any other formatting”, you set only FontSize and leave Bold, NotesColor, etc. alone — they stay at STYLE_NO_CHANGE, so applying the style won’t wipe out the existing bold or colour. Setting only what you want to change is the correct way to use this class. Conversely, style.Bold = False to “also clear bold” is a deliberate action, not “leaving it unset.”

IsDefault (read-only) tells you whether a style still has all attributes at the default (all STYLE_NO_CHANGE).

Applying it to rich text

A configured style applies two ways:

1. AppendStyle — affects text appended afterward. Call it on a NotesRichTextItem; whatever you AppendText next carries this style:

Dim body As NotesRichTextItem
Set body = doc.CreateRichTextItem("Body")
Call body.AppendStyle(style)
Call body.AppendText("This span is bold, size 14")

2. SetStyle — applies to a selected range. Call it on a NotesRichTextRange to apply the style to the selected span (this is the official example’s approach):

Set body = doc.GetFirstItem("Body")
Dim rtrange As NotesRichTextRange
Set rtrange = body.CreateRange
Dim rtstyle As NotesRichTextStyle
Set rtstyle = session.CreateRichTextStyle
rtstyle.FontSize = 18
Call rtrange.SetStyle(rtstyle)
Call doc.Save(True, True)

Quick rule: building as you go → AppendStyle; restyling an existing span → SetStyle.

What about Java and SSJS?

Consistent across all three, down to the STYLE_NO_CHANGE tri-state idea. Java/SSJS use getters/setters (setBold(...) / setFontSize(...)), and the constant is RichTextStyle.STYLE_NO_CHANGE on the Java side. To build formatted rich text in a back-end Java agent, the “set only what you want to change” principle applies just the same.

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