Formatting Text

The Properties inspector can be used to format text in much the same way as any wordprocessing program. When you highlight text, its properties appear in the Properties inspector and you can choose font, alignment, format, size, indentation, and lists.

There are a few important things to remember when formatting text:

Line Breaks: in html there are two types of line breaks, the tag <br> (break) which makes a single break to the line below, and the opening and closing tags <p> and </p> (paragraph), which causes a two-line drop. pressing "enter" creates a paragraph break (<p>), and holding down shift +enter creates a line break <br> to the next line below. A paragraph break will cause your text to lose all previous formatting, whereas a line break will retain formatting.

Alignment and Indentation: when changing the alignment or indentation of a section of text, remember to put paragraph breaks between sections, or all your text will take on the new format.

Lists: when creating lists, there must be paragraph breaks between each item for the list.

All options which appear on the text properties inspector can be found under the Text menu in the document window.

Formatting Color
The text properties inspector includes a small box, which when clicked allows you to change the color of your text. This is useful when changing the color of certain words, phrases, or sections. However, you can format the background color, text color, and link color all at once by choosing Modify > Page Properties from the document window menu. A dialog box like this appears:

Clicking on any of the color boxes will open up the color picker for that property:

By choosing colors for your background, text, links, visited links, and active links, you can control what colors appear on your webpage. If you leave any of these blank, the browser default will appear.

Information on web safe colors.