It is often desirable to create a partial character style that will impose just 
a few settings on selected text of any Paragraph style, without altering other 
parameters. For example, a single Character style "Green-this" could be applied 
to text in headings, body text, code samples, etc., and all it would do is 
alter the color of the selected text (to green in this example) and make it 
bold. It would leave unchanged the font, point-size, position (subscript, 
superscript...) spacing, tabs, etc., etc. that variously described the 
different Paragraph types.

This can be done in Character stylist, but with conflicting feedback. The 
summary description under the heading "Contains" shows the settings that are 
actually set by the Style, but all the fields have bogus values. So, looking at 
the dialog, the user is told by the "Font" field that the Character style being 
edited will be "Times New Roman", and the size will be 12-point, and so on. 
This is confusing, not true, and contradicts the information in "Contains".

To correct this, making the dialog fields reflect what is actually going on, 
and making it obvious to the user, all fields should have an "As-is" or "As-
found" setting. With "As-is" or "As-found" showing, the user could immediately 
see, and be confident, that the particular field was not carrying an unwanted 
value that would be improperly imposed by the Character Style. 

Any field that said "As-is" (or "As-found", or some other suitable label) would 
not impose any value when the Style was applied to text. When the formatter 
came to that field in the Style, it would skip over that attribute, leaving it 
untouched, and go on until it encountered a format attribute field that did 
have an overt value in it.

This modification would have at least three benefits:

1. It would make this kind of thing straightforward to document.
2. It would remove a blatant and confusing visual contradiction in the 
interface.
3. It would smooth the way for more FrameMaker users to switch to OOo.