Is there any practical difference whether report-wide settings appear in a "global" delaration (one not qualified by a "TYPE=" clause), or in a REPORT declaration (one opening with TYPE=REPORT)?

The GUI editor generates both. I wondered whether that's a matter of style or of necessesity.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: <Kathryn Henning>,

TYPE=REPORT set the "default" styling for the whole report, where TYPE=xxxx set a specific styling for that section of the report.

So you do need TYPE=REPORT to avoid specifying every section and need TYPE=xxxx to have specific styling per section.

jack, what does a view source of the resulting html look like, in each case? wonder if you can determine from looking there what the differences are , if any, in the < style > bits vs within the < td > bits, or maybe even the < span > bits

"TYPE=REPORT set the "default" styling for the whole report, where TYPE=xxxx set a specific styling for that section of the report.
"

Martin -- I know that.

I posted, bcs it looks to me as tho, when you park a section-specific setting (such as the top and bottom gaps) upstairs in the global declaration (alongside UNITS and PAPER, stuff that can only be specified once for the whole report) it becomes report-wide "immovable object" setting (i.e., cannot be over-ridden for a specific section) -- whereas in the REPORT section it creates just a report-wide "default" but can be over-ridden on a section-by-section basis.

Has anyone else come to a similar conclusion? And is there any indication of that in the documentation?

Jack,
I did not find anything in the doc.
My experience is that there is also some undocumented feature about the relative position of each styling entry, most of which is not always intuitive.
For example, I have to color code a field according to values. Although the different conditions are disjointed (not overlapping) the order of their appearance has an effect.
Some good old trial-and-trial-again and documentation in the code for future releases differences...

I found documentation to the effect that REPORT is the default value for TYPE.

A quick test with

...
UNITS=IN, FONT=ARIAL,$
TYPE=REPORT, FONT='COURIER NEW',$
...

shows that values in a TYPE-less global declaration are not treated as immutable -- they can be over-ridden by a subsequent TYPE=REPORT declaration.