It would be great to have a more flexible method of configuring styles; the purpose being to cut down on the number of styles with only minor differences between them.

We use page templates where the layout is pretty much the same, apart from minor differences / colours. But we have to define a complete set of styles for all colour variations, greatly increasing the complexity.

However, if you can enable any setting to be stored as a variable, this could reduce the number of styles in a document by 90%. For example:

A set of master styles for the document is created, with some settings being stored as variables. These variables are then associated with a particular page template. Then, when you use the master styles in the document, the appearance changes depending on which page template they're used on.

Used this way, if you have 10 page templates and 10 styles, the total number of styles for the document would be 10. However, at the moment, you have to define styles for each of the page templates, which would mean 100 styles in the document.

This also has other implications; for example, even though there are 10 styles with only subtle differences between them, they are used for the same purpose on each page (running headers, for example) - yet keyboard shortcuts can't be assigned as you'd have to use 10 different shortcuts, and remember which one is used for which template.

There are also advantages to using variables too - if you configure a page using one page template, then need to change the style, simply changing the page template would completely change the look in one action (whereas at the moment all styles would have to be changed manually or by find and replace).