Understanding ODS Styles

ODS styles are produced from compiled STYLE templates written in PROC TEMPLATE style syntax. An ODS style template is a collection of style elements that provides specific visual attributes for your SAS output.

Each style element is a named collection of style attributes such as color, marker symbol, line style, font face, as well as many others. For example, a density plot uses the GraphFit style element for its visual attributes. The GraphFit style element has attributes for color, line style, line thickness, and so on.

Each graphical element of a plot, such as a marker, a line, or a title, derives its visual properties from a specific style element from the active style. The style elements of a style are designed to ensure the goals of effective graphics.

The easiest way to change a graph's appearance is to change the style that the graph uses. For more information, see Changing the Style That Is Applied to ODS Graphs.

Every ODS output destination has an associated default style. These default styles are different for each destination; therefore, your output might look different depending on which destination you use. For example, the default style for the PRINTER destination is “Printer” while the default style for the RTF destination is “RTF.”

You can display a list of the available styles by submitting the following PROC TEMPLATE statements:

proc template;
   list styles;
run;