Chapter 7
Editors Are Bought, Not Born
In This Chapter
Editing, navigating, and generally messing with text
Searching, replacing, hyphenating, and checking the spelling of your text
Formatting each and every character in your document
Formatting paragraphs with style — and with styles
Dressing your text — one text box at a time
If you use a word processing or similar computer program, you know that editing (making changes to) text can be a breeze. Delete a word here, insert a couple words there, rewrite a sentence, add a comma, and the program takes care of the rest. The ease with which you can edit text in a computer program is one of the reasons that typewriters are choking landfills worldwide. My typewriter hasn’t seen the light of day in years. I keep it just so I can say that I have one.
Editing text in Publisher is easy, too. Almost everything you know about editing text in a word processor applies to editing and formatting text in Publisher. Although, admittedly, Publisher doesn’t have quite the editing muscle and sophistication of some full-blown, word processing programs, it still does a very respectable job.
Publisher is also more than a match for the formatting tools you find in any word processor. Its many text-formatting features enable you to take control of how your text looks, character by character, paragraph by paragraph, text box by text box. You control the horizontal; you control the vertical.
This chapter focuses on editing and formatting text in Publisher. It focuses specifically on working with text in text boxes, but you can use most of the techniques shown here to work with text in table frames as well.
Tricks of the Editing Meisters
You’re probably an editing master already. If you’ve been banging away at a word processor for a while, chances are that this section is a review for you. In case it’s not, I want to mention some tricks you can use to edit text in a text box.
To edit text, you first must position the insertion point in the text or highlight (select) the text. If you position the insertion point in the text, you can press Delete to remove any characters to the right of the insertion point or press Backspace to remove characters to the left. You can place the insertion point anywhere in a text box; when you do, Publisher also selects the text box for you.
If you select (highlight) text, any character you type replaces the highlighted text. This process works the same way in Publisher as it does in other Microsoft Office products. Be careful when selecting text: If you accidentally replace some text, press Ctrl+Z right away to undo your last action. (Have I mentioned backing up lately?)
Microsoft Office Word 2007
Microsoft Office Excel 2007
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
Microsoft Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager
Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007
Movin’ and groovin’
If you’re familiar with keys that move your insertion point in Microsoft Word, you find that they all work inside Publisher. You can also reposition the insertion point by using your keyboard’s movement keys: Home, End, PgUp, PgDn, and the four arrow keys.
Some keyboards offer a separate bank of navigation keys, and some keyboards place them on the numeric keypad, at the right end of the keyboard. To use the keys on the numeric keypad as navigation keys, you must first turn off the Num Lock key on the keyboard. If the Num Lock key is turned on, the keys display numbers rather than move your insertion point. Figure 7-1 shows an ergonomic-style, 101-key computer keyboard.
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Figure 7-1: An ergonomic-style, 101-key keyboard. |
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Table 7-1 lists some common movement keys and describes what they do. Notice that only the numbers on the numeric keypad (not on the main keyboard) move the insertion point. Turn off Num Lock on the keypad before using these keys to navigate.
| Key or Key Combination | Where It Moves the Insertion Point |
|---|---|
| Home or 7 | Beginning of current text line |
| End or 1 | End of current text line |
| Up arrow or 8 | Up one text line |
| Down arrow or 2 | Down one text line |
| Right arrow or 6 | Right one character |
| Left arrow or 4 | Left one character |
| Ctrl+Home or Ctrl+7 | Beginning of current text box |
| Ctrl+End or Ctrl+1 | End of current text box |
| Ctrl+up arrow or Ctrl+8 | Beginning of current paragraph |
| Ctrl+down arrow or Ctrl+2 | Beginning of next paragraph |
| Ctrl+right arrow or Ctrl+6 | Right one word |
| Ctrl+left arrow or Ctrl+4 | Left one word |
If text is highlighted, pressing the left- or right-arrow key positions the insertion point at the beginning or end of the text and then removes the highlighting (deselects the text).
Selection tricks
As I mention earlier in this chapter, before you can edit or format a piece of text, you must highlight (select) it. The simplest way to highlight text is to select the Select Objects tool in the toolbox and then drag the cursor over the text you want to highlight. You also have a couple other choices for highlighting text:
Double-click a word to select the word and any blank spaces following it.
Click at one end of the text you want to highlight, press and hold down the Shift key, click at the other end of the text, and then release the Shift key.
Combine the Shift key with any of the movement techniques listed in the preceding section. For example, to select an entire line of text, move the insertion point to the beginning of the line and then press Shift+End.
Choose Edit⇒Select All or press Ctrl+A (for all) to highlight all text in the current text box and in any connected text boxes.
You can also use the Shift key in combination with clicking or any movement technique to extend or reduce an existing highlight.
Drag and drop
Previous chapters in this book illustrate the use of the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands in several different applications. The cut/copy/paste technique is one of two ways to move text in text boxes. The other is drag and drop, which sounds like a training seminar for airport baggage handlers. By using drag-and-drop text editing, you can move and copy text within and between text boxes located on any single page or two-page spread without following all the steps of using the Windows Clipboard. I think of it as a direct form of cut and paste (or copy and paste, if you hold down the Ctrl key as you drag and drop).
To remove text from one spot and place it in another by using drag and drop, first highlight the text. After you complete that task, click the highlighted text and drag it to a new location. As soon as you release the mouse button, the text is dropped into its new location.
To copy text by using drag-and-drop, highlight the text you want to copy, press Ctrl, and then click and drag the selection to a new location. A small plus sign (+) shows up next to the arrow pointer, to indicate that you can now drag and drop and copy the selected text.
If the insertion point doesn’t change to an arrow pointer when you place it over selected text, you may have turned off drag-and-drop text editing, although for the life of me I can’t think of why you would want to do that. I love drag and drop. The Drag-and-Drop Text Editing check box on the Edit tab of the Options dialog box (it’s on the Tools menu) disables this feature (which is turned on by default) in all your publications.
Symbols
A big mistake that many new desktop publishers make is failing to use those special typographic characters that are known in Publisher as symbols. If you look carefully at this book, or any other well-produced publication, you can see symbols all over the place. These special symbols, which include fractions (such as 1⁄4); special quotation marks (" "); special hyphens, such as en dashes (–) and em dashes (—); ligatures (Æ, œ, æ); and so on are a typographer’s stock-in-trade.
Publisher provides two ways to put appropriate typographical symbols in your publications: automatically and manually. As you type, Publisher automatically replaces inch and foot marks (" and '), also known as straight quotes, with typographic quotation marks (“ ”, and ‘ ’), and double hyphens (- -) with em dashes (—). (Typographic quotation marks are often called smart quotes or curly quotes.) If you import text, punctuation marks in that text remain as they were in your source document.
What if you want to type an inch mark or a foot mark? You must turn off the Replace Straight Quotes with Smart Quotes option for a moment and then type the inch or foot mark. Don’t forget to turn on the option again.
To insert a symbol manually into a publication, choose Insert⇒Symbol and make your selection from the Symbol dialog box, as shown in Figure 7-2.
The Symbol dialog box shows you all available symbols in your installed system fonts. The current font appears, but you can switch to other fonts — including Symbol. As you make your way through the various font sets, you find en dashes, fractions, copyright and registration marks, foreign letters and currency symbols, smiley faces, hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades, and even the é you need in order to type résumé correctly. Many of the most commonly used symbols are on the Special Characters tab of the Symbols dialog box. If you’re looking for a special symbol, check out the Symbol font by selecting it from the Font list box. The Wingdings font is also a rich source of symbols, such as bullets, buttons, and bows.
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Figure 7-2: The Symbol dialog box. |
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Tools of the Editing Meisters
Any good page-layout program comes with a set of basic text management tools. Some of the heavyweight programs come with tools for formatting, text correction, seek and destroy, and other features that any word processor would envy. These tools are important; they increase accuracy and make your text more readable.
Publisher offers these tools:
Search and replace
A spell checker (including spell checking as you type)
AutoCorrect
Automatic hyphenation
Additionally, the Publisher Tools menu offers some other tools that aren’t specific to text management. The Design Checker command looks at your document for common printing problems, and the Design Gallery contains such Publisher-designed objects as pull quotes, logos, calendars, and more that you can use in your publication. I discuss the Design Gallery and Design Checker in Chapters 9 and 12, respectively. The sections that follow examine the text tools.
Hide and seek: Find and Replace
Any good word processor has a Find feature, a command that enables you to hunt down a specific word or phrase in your document. Okay, even poor word processors have a Find feature. Publisher has a Find feature and even a Replace feature, which enables you to search and replace one word or phrase with another. If you need to correct text at story length, you just can’t get by without these Search and Replace features.
Here’s how to find text:
1. Select a text box in the story you want Publisher to search.
Before finding and replacing text, press F9 to view your text at a readable size.
2. Choose Edit ⇒Find or press Ctrl+F.
The initial Find and Replace task pane, shown in Figure 7-3, appears.
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Figure 7-3: The Find and Replace task pane. |
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3. In the Find What text box, type the text you want Publisher to find, using wildcard symbols, if you want.
If you ever worked in MS-DOS, you probably know about wildcards. One wildcard, the question mark (?), works in the Find and Replace task pane. If you use a question mark in your search criteria, any character can be a match for the character in the question mark position. For example, if you ask Publisher to search for the text no?, it finds the words not, now, nod, and others. If you need to search for an actual question mark, type a caret (^) before the mark, as in ^?. To find a caret, ask a rabet. No, that’s not right. To find a caret, type ^^. Table 7-2 (appearing shortly) lists codes you can use to find other special characters.
4. Select the Match Whole Word Only check box or the Match Case check box, or both, if you want those options.
The Match Whole Word Only option finds any occurrence of your search string that’s surrounded by spaces or punctuation marks. This option ignores any matches that are part of larger words. With the option selected, a search for publish, for example, ignores the word publisher.
The Match Case option searches your document for an exact match of your search string’s characters, using upper- and lowercase characters as filtering criteria. With this option selected and the Match Whole Word Only option deselected, for example, a search for the word publish ignores any occurrence of Publisher; a search for the word Publish, however, finds Publisher.
5. Select All, Up or Down in the Search drop-down list box to specify the direction of the search.
If you choose the Up option, Publisher searches from the location of the cursor upward to the beginning of the text box or story. If you choose the Down option, it searches from the cursor location to the end of the text box or story. If you choose the All option, Publisher searches the entire publication.
6. Click the Find Next button.
Publisher scampers off to look for your text, and one of three things happens:
• The exact text you wanted is found and highlighted.
• Publisher finds an occurrence of your text but not the one you were looking for. Click the Find Next button to continue the search.
• Publisher reaches the beginning or end of the text without a match and opens a message box asking permission to continue looking through the rest of the publication (including master pages). Click Yes if you want to continue looking. If Publisher then searches the entire story and comes up empty, it displays a message box saying that no matching text was found. Sorry!
7. Click the Close button in the task pane to make the task pane run and hide when you finish searching.
Publisher can’t find the TV remote, your car keys, or your cellphone, either.
Sometimes, you may want to search for special characters, such as an end-of-paragraph mark or a tab space. You can do so by entering the codes listed in Table 7-2 into the Find What text box.
| To Find This | Use This Code |
|---|---|
| Two spaces | [two spaces] |
| Optional hyphen | ^- (caret and hyphen) |
| Nonbreaking hyphen (a hyphen that | ^~ (caret and tilde) |
| doesn’t break across a line ending) |
(continued)
| To Find This | Use This Code |
|---|---|
| Line break | ^n |
| End of paragraph mark | ^p |
| Nonbreaking space (a space that | ^s |
| doesn’t break across a line ending) | |
| Tab space | ^t |
| White space (a tab character | ^w |
| or space between words) |
Having Publisher help you find text is helpful, but getting the program to replace unwanted text is an even bigger labor-saving device. To find and replace text, choose the Edit⇒Replace command. Here’s how:
1. Select the story containing the text you want Publisher to replace.
2. Choose Edit ⇒Replace or press Ctrl+H.
The Find and Replace task pane appears with the Replace radio button selected (see Figure 7-4). It’s the same Find and Replace operation you see taking place in Figure 7-3; the program remembers the last text you typed in the Find What box during your current Publisher session.
3. Type the text you want to find in the Find What text box, and the text you want to replace it with in the Replace With text box. Then specify the Search option.
Publisher searches in only two directions while running Find and Replace: Down and All. In this way, it’s different from the Find feature.
You can also set the same Match options described in the preceding set of steps.
4. Click Find Next.
One of three things happens:
• A match is found. To replace the found text, click the Replace button. Publisher then searches for the next occurrence of the text specified in the Find What text box.
• A match is found but not the one you want. Click the Find Next button to continue the search.
• Publisher reaches the end of the text without finding a match, so it displays a message box asking whether to continue searching the rest of the publication (including master pages). Click the Yes button to continue the search, or click No to end the search. If Publisher still can’t find your text, it displays a message saying that it has finished searching.
5. Click the Close button in the task pane to make the task pane disappear when you finish searching and replacing.
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Figure 7-4: The Find and Replace task pane with the Replace radio button selected. |
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The Replace command is an excellent way to repair text that wasn’t prepared in the correct typographical way. For example, you can use the Replace command to replace all double spaces with single spaces. You can also replace other characters, such as double dashes and old-fashioned fractions, with their correct typographic counterparts. Use the Symbol dialog box (refer to Figure 7-2) to insert the correct symbol into your text. Cut or copy the symbol to the Clipboard, choose the Edit⇒Replace command, and type the old-fashioned mark that you want to replace in the Find What text box. Then click the Replace With text box and press Ctrl+V to insert the symbol there. The symbol may appear as a bizarre shape totally unrelated to what you copied from the publication, but don’t pay any attention to it. The symbol appears correctly again after it’s back in the publication.
Now you’re ready to replace at will. Just to be safe, however, always test your replacement text by replacing a single match before using the Replace All button to apply the replace universally.
Can you check my spelling?
There’s no doubt about it: Spalling errors make you look bad. To begin checking your spelling, select a text box and then choose Tools⇒Spelling⇒Spelling or press F7. Publisher immediately searches for the first word that it doesn’t recognize; if it finds one, the Check Spelling dialog box, shown in Figure 7-5, appears. Publisher places that word in the Not in Dictionary text box. You can correct the word in the Change To text box, and the spell checker even suggests close matches in the Suggestions list box.
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Figure 7-5: The Check Spelling dialog box. |
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You have several choices for dealing with each word that Publisher flags:
If the word is incorrect and you can find the correct word in the Suggestions list box: Double-click the correct word.
Alternatively, you can single-click the correct word and then click Change All to have Publisher automatically fix every occurrence of the incorrect word as it finds it.
If the word is incorrect and you can’t find the correct word in the Suggestions list box: Enter the correct word in the Change To text box and then click the Change or Change All button.
If the word is correct but it’s not a word you use often: Click the Ignore button to leave the word as is. Or, click Ignore All to leave every occurrence of the word that Publisher finds in this particular spelling check as is.
If the word is correct and it’s a word you use often (such as your own name): Click the Add button to add the word to the Publisher dictionary. Be careful with this button, though, because if you add an incorrect word to the dictionary, Publisher never points out the word again, in this or any other publication!
Publisher checks spelling as relentlessly as my editor does. Eventually, though, it runs out of words to check and displays a dialog box telling you that it has finished checking your spelling. Click OK to close the Check Spelling dialog box.
What are those squiggly red lines in the text box? Publisher can check your spelling as you type. When you misspell a word, it’s marked by a squiggly red underline to let you know that you made a boo-boo. Choose Tools⇒Spelling⇒Spelling Options and click to select the Check Spelling As You Type option. (This option is selected by default.)
Hyphenation
To fit more text in a given space or to make justified text easier to read, you can have Publisher hyphenate your text, by automatically breaking words in two at line endings. This process is automated, so Publisher continually removes and adds hyphens as needed as you type, edit, and rearrange text.
To have Publisher hyphenate your text automatically, follow these steps:
1. Select the text frame or story that you want to hyphenate.
2. Choose Tools ⇒Language ⇒Hyphenation or press Ctrl+Shift+H.
The Hyphenation dialog box, shown in Figure 7-6, appears.
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Figure 7-6: The Hyphenation dialog box. |
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3. Verify that the Automatically Hyphenate This Story check box is selected and then click the OK button.
Your text is now hyphenated. If you later change the text in any way, Publisher automatically re-hyphenates the text.
If you don’t trust Publisher to hyphenate your text for you or if you want to manually control where a hyphen in a word occurs, you can click the Manual button in the Hyphenation dialog box. Then, when Publisher finds a word appropriate for hyphenating, it shows you that word and how it wants to hyphenate it. You can either approve, modify, or reject the hyphenation. If you use this option, though, Publisher doesn’t re-hyphenate your text for you; you have to issue the Hyphenation command again.
Another control you have in adjusting hyphenation is the setting in the Hyphenation Zone text box. The smaller the hyphenation zone, the more hyphens Publisher uses and the more even the right edge of your text is.
To remove automatic hyphenation, choose the Tools⇒Language⇒Hyphenation command again. Click the Automatically Hyphenate This Story check box to deselect the option.
Text Formatting
If you’ve worked in a word processor, you’ve formatted your share of text. Perhaps you’re a text formatting meister. Even so, you may learn a trick or two in the sections that follow. If you don’t, reward yourself with three gold asterisks and move on down the line.
Modern word processors and page layout programs divide the formatting that you can apply to text into three formatting levels:
Character: You can apply this type of format to each character in your text: type styles, fonts, sizes, and cases, for example.
Paragraph: This default format applies to paragraphs. Some formats, such as styles, you may be able to change. Others, such as line spacing, may not be changed, depending on the program you’re using.
Document: This type of format usually applies to the entire document. Page margins are an example of a document format. Because Publisher treats stories as though they’re documents, document formats apply to text boxes and to connected text boxes with a story in them.
If you understand which formats belong to which category, you can quickly apply the format you want in order to get professional results — and often with dramatic time savings.
The Formatting toolbar
After you select a chunk of text, a Formatting toolbar appropriate to text formatting appears under the Standard toolbar. Figure 7-7 shows the Formatting toolbar for text. Most of the toolbar elements should be familiar to you if you have worked in a word processor.
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Figure 7-7: The Formatting toolbar. |
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This list describes the formatting options on the toolbar, from left to right:
Style list box: Enables you to choose a style and apply it to your selection. A style is a set of formats that apply to a paragraph, as explained later in this chapter.
Font list box: Shows the current font and enables you to select a different one.
Font Size list box: Displays the current font size and enables you to enter a new one.
Bold, Italic, and Underline buttons: Set the font style.
Align Left, Center, Align Right, and Justify buttons: Apply text justification, which is a paragraph-level setting.
Line Spacing button: Controls the spacing between lines.
Numbering button: Accesses a paragraph-level setting that enables you to automatically number your paragraphs. (Great for creating numbered Steps lists!)
Bullets button: Applies a paragraph-level setting that enables you to automatically place bullets at the beginning of paragraphs. (The Bullet List look.)
Decrease Indent button: Moves the selected paragraph to the previous tab stop.
Increase Indent button: Moves the selected paragraph to the next tab stop.
Decrease Font Size button: Changes the selected text to the next smaller font size listed in the Font Size list box.
Increase Font Size button: Changes the selected text to the next larger font size listed in the Font Size list box.
Fill Color button: Applies color to the background of a text frame.
Line Color button: Opens the Color Selector pop-up menu, which enables you to change the color of the selected line.
Font Color button: Opens the Color Selector pop-up menu, which enables you to change the font color of selected text.
Line/Border Style button: Enables you to place borders around text frames.
Dash Style: Lets you choose the type of dashed line.
Arrow Style: Allows you to choose the type of arrow.
Shadow Style: Allows you to choose a shadow for the text box.
3-D Style: Lets you choose a 3D style for the text box.
You must realize that the toolbar offers only highlights of what’s possible format-wise. Many of the Format menu commands that the buttons duplicate open dialog boxes containing lots of additional options. Still, the buttons are a convenient, quick way to apply basic formatting.
Character formatting
Character formatting enables you to change the appearance of individual characters. Character formatting is most often used for emphasis, to set text apart from the text surrounding it. For example, words are often italicized to make them stand out in a block of plain text.
One confusing aspect of text formatting is that you can format the text in your paragraphs at the paragraph level and also format individual characters in that paragraph any way you want. You can think of paragraph formatting as a default format that you can override as needed.
Choosing a font
Perhaps the most noticeable character format is the font of your text. The font (or typeface) determines each character’s basic shape. Microsoft Windows and Publisher together offer you lots of fonts. Text always uses one font or another; by default, it’s Times New Roman. Some fonts, such as Vacation MT, Webdings, and Wingdings, are symbol fonts and aren’t used for regular text.
As though the fonts that come with Publisher and Windows weren’t enough, even more might be available to you: Other Windows programs might have installed additional fonts on your computer, and your printer might have its own set of built-in fonts. If you become a raving font addict, rest assured that you can buy and install even more fonts.
Choose one of these two methods to change the font for selected text:
Select the font name from the Font list box on the toolbar.
Choose Format⇒Font to open the Font dialog box, shown in Figure 7-8. Click the font name in the Font list box.
If no font name appears in the Font box, you probably highlighted text that’s formatted with more than one font. You can still use the Font list box to apply the font you want.
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Figure 7-8: The Font dialog box. |
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TrueType is generally the most hassle-free font type to use, but you may want to go with printer fonts if you’re having a print service print your publication printed. Many print services use Postscript fonts that require printer descriptions.
Note that if you do use printer fonts, those fonts may look bad on-screen. Because Windows has only sketchy information about any given printer font, your on-screen characters may be misshapen, and lines of text may appear clipped off in certain views. Everything should look fine when you print your publication, though. Chapter 8 explains fonts and typography in detail.
Changing the font size
There must be something about publishing professionals that makes using standard English terms difficult for them. Even when they’re simply measuring the size of text, they can’t stick with inches, centimeters, or any other measurement that the rest of the world uses. Instead, they measure the height of text in points. A point is approximately 1⁄72 of an inch, and you can make text any size from 0.5 point to 999.9 points, in 0.1-point increments. In inches, those measurements translate from 1⁄14 inch to almost 14 inches high — that’s quite a range! Unless you’re making banners, though, you probably will keep your text somewhere between 6 and 72 points.
Choose one of these methods to change the size of selected text:
Select the size from the Font Size list box on the toolbar or enter your own size into the list box.
Choose Format⇒Font to open the Font dialog box (refer to Figure 7-8) and enter the font size there.
If no font size appears in the Font dialog box’s Size list box, you probably highlighted text formatted with more than one size. You can still use the Size list box to apply the size you want.
With TrueType fonts, you can enter any font size you want (in the allowed range), even decimal numbers. Some printer fonts support only a limited set of sizes, however. If you plan to use printer fonts, consult the printer’s documentation to see whether this limitation applies.
Applying a type style
The last important character format is type style, which Publisher refers to as effects. If you want to make a word or two stand out, apply text effects such as boldface, italics, or underlining. You can apply these effects to selected text by using toolbar buttons or choosing options from the Font dialog box. You can specify whether you want to underline all selected text or just individual words and not the spaces between them. You can choose a double underline, a wavy underline, or a dotted or dashed underline. Go ahead — take a peek at the Underline list box in the Font dialog box. You can also create superscript or subscript effects, all caps or small caps, or outline, shadow, emboss, and engrave effects in the Font dialog box.
| Shortcut | Applies | Shortcut | Applies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ctrl+B | Bold | Ctrl+I | Italic |
| Ctrl+U | Underline | Ctrl+Shift+K | Small caps |
| Ctrl+= | Superscript | Ctrl+Shift+= | Subscript |
| Ctrl+spacebar | Plain text (removes all style formats from selected text) |
With the exception of Ctrl+spacebar, all these keyboard shortcuts are toggles: Press the shortcut once to turn on the effect; press the shortcut a second time to remove the effect.
As with font and font size, you can use either the toolbar buttons or the Font dialog box (more generally) to make your type style selections. When you select text to which the bold, italic, or underline effect has been applied, the corresponding button on the toolbar has a pushed-in look. You can simultaneously select text that has one of these effects applied and text that does not. When you do this, you may notice that the corresponding toolbar button doesn’t have the pushed-in look. If you click the button once, you remove the effect from all the highlighted text. Click again to apply the effect to all the selected text.
Some fonts (not common Windows ones, though) don’t support boldface and italics. For these fonts, the B (bold) and I (italic) buttons are useless. You can click them all you want, but your text doesn’t change.
Getting the yearn to kern
If you’re really picky about how your text looks, you can even control the amount of horizontal space between characters, either squishing text together or spreading it apart. Publishing professionals call this effect kerning. (Don’t confuse kerning with line spacing. Kerning controls the amount of horizontal spacing between characters, whereas line spacing controls the vertical spacing between lines of text.)
By default, Publisher automatically kerns between relatively large characters — any text that’s 14 points or larger. To get Publisher to kern even smaller characters, choose the Format⇒Character Spacing command from the menu and change the setting in the Kern Text At scroll box. Publisher then adjusts the spacing between letters based on a list of letter pairs that are part of a font’s definition.
Publisher does a good job of automatic kerning, but if you have some specific text that you want to kern manually, you have two choices, tracking or kerning. First, choose Format⇒Character Spacing from the menu. This command opens the Character Spacing dialog box, as shown in Figure 7-9, where you can adjust the spacing for large selections (Publisher calls it tracking) or fine-tune the spacing between two characters (Publisher calls it kerning). Perfect kerning is one of those power features that desktop publishers crave.
Don’t bother spending much time kerning text in a smaller font. Kerning is best done on large-font text, particularly headline text. Figure 7-10 shows you the difference between tight and loose kerning.
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Figure 7-9: The Character Spacing dialog box. |
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Figure 7-10: Condensed versus expanded kerning. |
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Paragraph formatting
Whereas character formatting enables you to control text one character at a time, paragraph formatting controls entire paragraphs. Paragraph formatting includes line spacing, alignment within a frame, tab stops, indents, and formatting text as bulleted or numbered lists.
You probably discovered in grade school that a paragraph is a group of sentences that forms a complete thought. Well, forget it! In Publisher, regardless of complete thoughts, a paragraph is anything that ends with a paragraph mark (one of those special characters that you create every time you press the Enter key). Thus, if you type a three-line address and press Enter to begin each new line, that address consists of three separate paragraphs. If you want, you can format each of those paragraphs differently.
With character formatting, you must select all the text that you want to format. But you don’t need to bother highlighting entire paragraphs to apply paragraph formatting. To mark a single paragraph for paragraph formatting, just click to place the insertion point anywhere in the paragraph or highlight text anywhere in the paragraph. To mark multiple paragraphs for formatting, just highlight some text in each of those paragraphs. Keep this in mind during the next few sections whenever I tell you to mark a paragraph.
Adjusting line spacing
If you’ve done a decent amount of word processing, you know all about setting line spacing within a paragraph — the old single-space-versus-double-space dichotomy. You may not have known, however, that you can control the amount of space that appears above and below each paragraph. This option is important for making headings stand out and for many other purposes.
To change a paragraph's line spacing, follow these steps:
1. Select the paragraphs you want to affect, and then choose Format ⇒Paragraph from the menu.
The Paragraph dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 7-11.
2. In the Line Spacing section of the dialog box, use the Before Paragraphs drop-down list to specify the amount of space to appear before the first line of each paragraph.
3. In the same section, use the After Paragraphs drop-down list to specify the amount of space to appear before the last line of each paragraph.
The Sample box shows you the result of your settings.
4. (Optional) Specify the line spacing within a paragraph by using the Between Lines drop-down list in the Line Spacing section of the Paragraph dialog box.
Alternatively, you can press Ctrl+1 for single-spaced text; Ctrl+2 for double-spaced; Ctrl+5 for 11⁄2 line space; and Ctrl+0 (zero) to remove the space before a paragraph.
It’s considered good typographical practice to set line spacing rather than insert additional paragraph marks to create spacing. Then, if you decide to change the spacing between the paragraphs later, you need to work with the attributes of only the paragraphs that contain your content. You don’t need to add or delete paragraphs you use as space holders.
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Figure 7-11: Setting line spacing in the Paragraph dialog box. |
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You can specify any and all line spacing settings in terms of these measurements:
in: Inches
cm: Centimeters
pt: Points
pi: Picas
sp: A special Publisher space measurement
One space in Publisher always equals 120 percent of the current text size — an ideal size-to-spacing ratio for single spacing. If you use the sp measurement (1 sp for single-spacing, 2 sp for double spacing, and so on), the line spacing changes as the text size changes. If you use any other measurement, the line spacing remains the same when you enlarge or reduce your text size, even if the result is wildly squished or spaced-out text lines.
You can enter any of the measurement units just listed into the Line Spacing text boxes in the Paragraph dialog box. Publisher automatically converts the units (except for the sp unit) to the default measurement units. You set the default measurement unit in the Options dialog on the Tools menu.
Setting paragraph alignment
By default, Publisher lines up paragraphs along the left edge of the text frame that holds them. Text aligned in this manner is said by typographers to be ragged right, or left justified. To push text instead to the right edge (ragged left, or right justified), to center it between the edges (fully ragged), or to stretch it from edge to edge (fully justified), you change its alignment, also called justification in publishing lingo.
Here are some ways to set paragraph alignment for selected paragraphs:
The easiest way is to click one of the four alignment icons on the Formatting toolbar (from left to right across the toolbar): Align Text Left, Center, Align Text Right, or Justify.
Use the following keystrokes: Ctrl+L for left justified; Ctrl+R for right justified; Ctrl+E for center (think even!); or Ctrl+J for fully justified. Press Ctrl+Q to return your paragraph to the default format.
Use the Alignment drop-down list on the Indents and Spacing tab of the Paragraph dialog box.
Justified text can stretch your text out so far that it’s difficult to read. To remedy this, try hyphenating the text, as described earlier in this chapter, in the “Hyphenation” section.
Setting tab stops
When you press the Tab key in a text box, Publisher inserts a tab mark. How this special character affects the text following it depends on the tab stops that are set for the paragraph.
By default, left-aligned tab stops are set every half-inch on the horizontal ruler. (When you’re working in a text box, a special subsection of the horizontal ruler measures distances from the frame’s left edge.) Thus, each tab mark you create usually causes the text following the mark to left-align with the next available half-inch mark. For example, if your text is 11⁄4 inch from the left edge of a frame and you insert a tab mark before that text, the text left-aligns with the 11⁄2-inch ruler mark.
By setting your own, custom tab stops, however, you can align tab marks in a number of other ways. Publisher supports four different kinds of tab stops:
Left: This setting is the default, and a tab moves text to the right of the tab mark so that it aligns flush left to the tab stop.
Center: A tab moves text so that it aligns centered on the tab stop.
Right: A tab moves text so that it aligns flush right to the tab stop.
Decimal: A tab moves text so that any decimal point aligns to the tab stop. This tab is useful for aligning numeric data in tables.
Sometimes, you might want to use a tab leader, a set of characters that fill any gap created by a tab mark. Publisher offers dots, dashes, lines, and bullets as leaders. Dotted tab leaders are commonly used with right-aligned tab stops in tables of contents (such as at the beginning of this book). The dots connect the titles on the left with the page numbers on the right. In that case, you need to set tabs by using the Tabs dialog box, as explained in these steps:
1. Select the paragraphs you want to affect.
2. Choose Format ⇒Tabs.
The Tabs dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 7-12.
If you know exactly where you want to place a tab, double-click the ruler at that location. A tab stop is inserted, and the Tabs dialog box opens.
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Figure 7-12: The Tabs dialog box. |
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3. In the Tab Stop Position list box, specify a position for the tab stop in the upper text field.
You can type any of the units of measurement that Publisher accepts in the Tab Stop Position list box: inches, centimeters, picas, points, or pixels. Publisher automatically converts the units to the current default measurement units. (You set the default measurement unit on the Tools menu in the Options dialog box.)
This position is the distance between the left edge of the text box and the tab stop.
4. In the Alignment section, choose how you want text to align to your tab stop.
5. (Optional) Set a tab leader.
6. Click the Set button.
Your tab-stop position now appears in the lower section of the Tab Stop Position list box.
7. (Optional) Set additional tabs by repeating Steps 3 through 6.
8. Click the OK button.
After you set custom tab stops, the horizontal ruler displays those stops, using symbols for the four kinds of tab stops. If you’re fairly adept with the mouse, you can fine-tune the position of a tab stop by dragging it back and forth on the ruler. Be careful to point directly to the tab stop you want to move, however, or you might accidentally create a new stop.
Here are some helpful shortcuts for working with tab stops:
To delete a tab stop: Drag it down and off the horizontal ruler. Or, use the Clear and Clear All buttons in the Tabs dialog box.
Notice that the Tabs dialog box provides an option for changing the Default tab stops from every half-inch to any other increment you like.
To modify the alignment or leader of an existing tab stop: Open the Tabs dialog box and click to select the stop you want to change in the Tab Stop Position list box. Then set the alignment or leader (or both), click Set, and click OK.
Remember that tab stops are paragraph specific. If you click or highlight text in another paragraph, the horizontal ruler displays in that new paragraph any custom tab stops that are set. If the tab stops on the horizontal ruler are gray, you probably highlighted text in multiple paragraphs that use different tab stops.
Tab stops can be a pain. If you get frustrated from working with them, remember that just about anything you can accomplish with tab stops, you can often more easily accomplish with indents, table frames, and multiple text boxes.
Setting paragraph indents
Indents are like margins that affect only individual paragraphs. By default, all indents are set to 0, which makes paragraphs align with the text box margins. By increasing the indent setting, you can move paragraphs in from those margins.
To set indents, follow these steps:
1. Mark the paragraphs you want to affect.
2. Choose Format ⇒Paragraph from the menu.
The Paragraph dialog box opens. (Refer to Figure 7-11.)
3. In the Indentation section of the dialog box, choose the type of indent you want from the Preset drop-down list.
• Flush Left: Aligns the entire paragraph with the left margin
• 1st Line Indent: Indents the first line of the paragraph by 1⁄4 inch
• Hanging Indent: Indents all lines except the first line of a paragraph by 1⁄4 inch
• Quotation: Justifies the text so that it’s formatted into a block quote
• Custom Indent: Allows you to create your own indent style
4. (Optional) Use the Left, First Line, and Right options to fine-tune the preset indent.
The Left option indents the left edge of every paragraph line; First Line indents the left edge of just the first paragraph line; and Right indents the right edge of every paragraph line.
The Sample box shows the effect of your choices.
5. Click OK.
After you set custom indents, indent markers — those little black triangles on the horizontal ruler — move to reflect the indenting. If you want, you can change the indents by dragging the indent markers back and forth:
The upper-left indent marker: Controls the left edge of the first line in the paragraph
The lower-left marker: Controls the left edge of every line in the paragraph except for the first line
The right indent marker: Controls the right edge of every line in the paragraph
The rectangle under the lower-left marker: Controls both the first line and left indents
Be careful to point the cursor directly at the indent marker you want to move, however, or you might accidentally create a tab stop. If the indent markers on the horizontal ruler are gray, you probably highlighted text in multiple paragraphs that use different indents. You can still use the markers to adjust your indents.
As an example of how indents are used, consider the hanging indent, as shown in Figure 7-13. You create a hanging indent by setting the left indent larger than the first-line indent.
Unlike some word processors, Publisher doesn’t allow you to set negative indents. That is, your text can’t extend beyond the text box margins. You might, however, be able to get text to move closer to the edge of a text box by reducing the internal margins of the text box. To do this, choose the Format⇒Text Box command from the menu.
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Figure 7-13: A hanging indent. |
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Using paragraph styles
You might not want to get into this subject, but many hard-core desktop publishers prefer to use text styles to apply text formatting. A text style is a named set of attributes that you can apply to a paragraph. (If you’ve used a modern word-processing program, you might already be familiar with text styles.)
I use text styles extensively because they are terrific labor-saving devices. For example, if you want all your body text to be double-spaced, 12-point, Arial italic text with a 1⁄4-inch first-line indent, you can create a text style that contains all those formatting instructions. When you then apply that style to a paragraph, all the text in that paragraph instantly takes on each formatting option specified by the style. If you later decide to edit a text style, all paragraphs that bear that style change instantly — it’s quite the timesaver! So, most experienced authors, editors, layout artists, and publishers start the text-formatting process by creating a style sheet of all allowed paragraph types in their documents. Then they apply these styles to their work.
To create, change, rename, delete, and even import styles, choose Format⇒Styles from the menu. The Styles task pane, shown in Figure 7-14, appears.
Start the style creation process by clicking the New Style button, at the bottom of the Styles task pane. Doing so leads to dialog boxes that direct you to the various character and paragraph formatting dialog boxes I cover earlier in this chapter. You can set the following properties as part of a text style:
Character type and size
Indents and lists
Line spacing
Character spacing
Tabs
The Styles task pane lists the available styles — and shows you what the available styles look like.
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Figure 7-14: The Styles task pane. |
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When you have your style looking exactly as you want it, give it its own name and then save it. The style is then listed in the Style list box, ready to do its thing for you at a moment’s notice.
Has that moment arrived? Well, then, to apply your new text style to selected paragraphs, simply select the style from the Style list box at the left end of the Formatting toolbar, or change the selection in the Styles task pane.
Using the Format Painter
Publisher — like many other Microsoft Office products — offers the Format Painter feature. Format Painter enables you to copy the format of an object to another object. This feature is particularly useful when it’s applied to text. It works generally with any object, however.
To copy and paste the formatting of selected characters or a paragraph:
1. Highlight the text containing the formatting you want to copy.
You can select the characters or any part of a paragraph that contains the paragraph mark.
2. Click the Format Painter button on the toolbar.
Your pointer turns into a paintbrush that looks like the Format Painter button.
3. Click and drag the pointer over the characters or paragraph mark that you want to change.
The formatting is transferred to the selected text.
Text box formatting
Two text formatting features affect entire text boxes:
Hyphenating text
Arranging text in snaking columns
Because these features affect entire text boxes, it doesn’t matter whether you highlight text before you apply them.
The Hyphenation section, earlier in this chapter, discusses the Publisher Hyphenation feature. (Chapter 12 discusses this feature more fully.) In many programs, hyphenation is done at the paragraph level, but in Publisher, hyphenation is done an entire text box at a time.
In publications such as newsletters, text is often laid out in snaking columns, where text ends at the bottom of one column and continues at the top of the next. You can create snaking text columns by laying down text frames side by side and then connecting those frames, as described in Chapter 6. But that’s the hard way of doing things. If you wanted to do things the hard way, you probably wouldn’t be reading this book.
The easy way to do this, because the steps are so simple, is to set up multiple columns in a single text box (so that your text can snake through). To set multiple columns within a text box, follow these steps:
1. Select the text box.
2. Choose Format ⇒Text Box and select the Text Box tab.
The Format Text Box dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 7-15.
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Figure 7-15: The Format Text Box dialog box. |
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3. Click the Columns button.
The Columns dialog box appears.
4. In the Columns Number drop-down list, enter the number of columns you want.
You can have up to 63 columns in one text box.
5. In the Columns Spacing drop-down list, specify how much space you want between columns.
Publishing professionals call this space a column gutter. The Sample area shows you an example of how your text box gets divided.
6. Click the OK button to close the Columns dialog box, and click OK again to close the Format Text Box dialog box.
The text in your text box rearranges itself into multiple, snaking columns.
Publisher automatically ends one column of text and begins the next after it runs out of room at the bottom of a text box. To lengthen a column, try decreasing the top and bottom margins of the text box or resizing the text box.
To force Publisher to end a column before it reaches the bottom of a text box, place the insertion point where you want the column to end and then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. This keyboard shortcut is the same one that Word uses to specify the end of a section, and this keystroke is imported from Word as a column end.