Patent ID: 7370274

Claim:
A method to be executed at least in part in a computing device for formatting objects in a page of an electronic document comprising: receiving a first instance of an object as an input for the page in the electronic document, wherein the page is associated with a style sheet; receiving formatting information associated with the first instance of the object; setting formatting parameters for the first instance of the object in the page and in the style sheet based on the received formatting information; receiving another instance of the object an input for the page in the electronic document; tracking a position of the other instance of the object relative to the page; calculating the position of the first instance of the object in the style sheet; comparing the position of the first instance of the object to the position of the other instance of the object; determining a format for the other instance of the object based on the position of the first instance of the object in the style sheet; and applying the format to the other instance of the object, wherein the format includes at least one from a set of: a font, an indent position, a line spacing, a bullet style, a numbering style, a text flow around graphics, a color transparency of graphics, a horizontal placement of graphics, and a scaling of graphics relative to an absolute size of the graphics.