Opera user styles

Introduction

For years Opera is offered the ability to tune the "author" and "user" mode, and the ability to add a personal stylesheet so you decide how a page looks. Opera 7 added the User Styles to this list. These are stylesheets which can be loaded as alternate stylesheets and they can be very useful! They can be found on the addressbar, in the dropdown next to the author/user toggle or via the View -> Styles menu.

Turning them on

By default they are only available in the user mode, but they are much more useful in author mode, so if you want to use them, first change the settings under File -> Preferences -> Page Style

These are my settings:

Author mode                       User mode
[x] Page stylesheet               [ ] Page stylesheet
[x] Page fonts and colors         [ ] Page fonts and colors
[x] My stylesheet                 [x] My stylesheet
[ ] My fonts and colors           [x] My fonts and colors
[ ] My link style                 [x] My link style

Description

There are currently 12 User stylesheets available from the View --> Style menu.

Emulate text browser: Gives an impression of how a page would look in a text browser
Nostalgia: The Look 'n' Feel of an old commodore computer
Accessibility layout: Make the page better readable but also automatically inserts the values of the accesskeys to the page so the user can quickly see there are accesskeys present.
Show images and links only: In some cases very useful
High contrast (B/W) (W/B): Makes a page much better readable by making all colours black and white
Hide non linking images: Useful to find image links in pages
Hide certain sized elements (aggressive): This effectively sets display:none to a lot of known banner sizes
Disable tables: This says what it does :)
Show structural elements: This is soooo useful when debugging a page layout! The stylesheet inserts the tags and their classes by means of CSS so you can easily see which elements of a page have a certain class or id.
Debug with outline: This is almost essential for debugging a page design: it gives an outline to most of the elements on the page and that way you can quickly get an overview of all the paddings and margins on your page and see where things go wrong. Brilliant stylesheet!

Adding your own

When you are quite savvy with stylesheets you can of course create your own and add it to this list. You do that by opening the OperaDef6.ini file in the Opera directory and adding a line in the [Local CSS Files] section.

[Local CSS Files]
Name 1=Emulate text browser
File 1=C:\Program Files\Opera7\styles\user\textonly.css

You can now add/remove as many as you want.