# How to trace the stylesheet directives responsible for the selected text's appearance?

By way of example, in a typical Mathematica interactive session, one sees text content as shown below:

Three different text styles can be seen in this figure: input, output, and the style for the In[1]:= and Out[1]= bits. (I'm primarily interested in the first two.)

My question is: How can I pinpoint exactly where the various parameters that determine the appearances of these styles are set? In particular, where are the font family and font size set?

(Somewhere in Mathematica's infinite ocean of style directives, there is one that says something like FontFamily->"Courier", and that wends its way to determine the appearance of the text in the input and output cells above. I want to locate this style directive.)

I imagine that each setting may affect the styles shown above through long chains of inheritance, and that the origin of one setting may have nothing to do with the origin of the other one.

NB: My question is neither "How do I modify the appearance of a given style?" nor "What's the style of a given piece of text?".

NB2: The text above is just an example, albeit an important one. My question is general: given some text in a Mathematica notebook (e.g. a documentation notebook, a slideshow notebook, etc.), how can I pinpoint where its various style parameters are defined?

• I'm waiting for an answer to this question since Mathematica 6 ! – andre314 Apr 24 '16 at 20:00
• I hope there is a way because the only one I know is to manually track Styles and its parents, keeping in mind FormatTypes that can interfere and all those exceptions: J.Fultz: How is the cell style of a given cell resolved.. And that's just in case of "pure cells". For graphics and other wrappers stuff like WhateverBoxOptions + default options for Whatever functions are joining the game and that's really entertaining. – Kuba Apr 24 '16 at 21:17